The Exception That Proves The Rule
How Shredding exposes a fundamental flaw in Ultimate Frisbee.
Intro
The phrase "the exception that proves the rule" is often misunderstood because people interpret it literally, assuming it means an exception somehow validates or confirms a rule. This leads to confusion, as an exception typically weakens a rule's universality. The misunderstanding stems from modern usage and the phrase's philosophical origins, where "prove" means "test" rather than "confirm."
Why It's Misunderstood:
Modern Meaning of "Prove": Today, "prove" implies confirming something as true. So, people mistakenly think the phrase suggests that an exception strengthens the rule, which is counterintuitive.
Loose Usage: The phrase is often used colloquially to dismiss exceptions without explaining their significance, making it sound like a justification for ignoring contradictions (e.g., "This doesn't fit, but it's just the exception that proves the rule").
Ambiguity in Context: Without clear context, the phrase can seem to imply that any exception somehow supports the rule, leading to logical confusion.
What It Actually Means:
The phrase originates from the Latin legal maxim exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, meaning "the exception tests the rule in cases not excepted." In its original sense:
"Prove" means "test": The exception challenges the rule's validity by highlighting a case where it doesn't apply. If a rule has exceptions, it may not be as universal or robust as claimed.
The exception defines the rule's limits: By identifying cases where the rule fails, the exception clarifies the rule's scope or conditions. For example, a rule might hold generally but break down in specific scenarios, prompting a refinement of the rule.
Example for Clarity:
Rule: "All birds can fly."
Exception: A penguin, which is a bird but cannot fly.
Correct Interpretation: The existence of penguins "tests" the rule, showing it’s not universally true. It doesn't confirm the rule but exposes its limitations, suggesting a more accurate rule, like "Most birds can fly, except flightless ones like penguins."
Misunderstanding: Some might say penguins are "the exception that proves the rule," implying penguins somehow validate the idea that all birds fly, which is illogical.
How It’s Used Correctly:
The phrase is best used in contexts where an exception highlights the need to refine or reconsider a rule, not to blindly uphold it. For instance:
In law: A legal rule might have an exception that clarifies its application (e.g., "No parking here," with an exception for emergency vehicles, showing the rule applies only to non-emergency cases).
In science: An anomaly (like a black swan for the rule "all swans are white") tests and potentially disproves a hypothesis, pushing for a better framework.
Shredding: The Philosophical Offense That Became the Exception That Proves the Rule
In the history of sport, every once in a while, a system or idea emerges that doesn’t just outperform its peers but renders the very framework in which those peers operate obsolete. In Ultimate Frisbee, that idea is Shredding. Developed by Frank Huguenard over the course of 40 years, Shredding is not a tactic, a strategy, or even a style of play. It is a philosophy—a principle that redefines what it means to possess, move, and create leverage with the disc.
And it is also something far more profound: Shredding is the exception that proves the rule.
The idiom “the exception that proves the rule” is often misunderstood. Properly interpreted, it refers to an anomaly so conspicuous, so incompatible with the assumptions of the system it arises within, that it exposes the system’s limitations. It is a falsifying instance—a use case that disqualifies the legitimacy of the framework it contradicts. In this sense, Shredding is not a clever workaround of Ultimate’s dead-ball, self-officiated tradition. It is a disqualification of that tradition.
The Mold That Shredding Breaks
Ultimate Frisbee was born from the countercultural New Games Movement and shaped by teenage creators without varsity athletic backgrounds. As such, the game was built on four primary assumptions:
That self-officiating could scale into high-level competition
That a hybrid of dead-ball and continuous play could create coherent mechanics
That the Spirit of the Game would ensure fairness through shared values
That offenses must be static between catches and only dynamic off the disc
For decades, these assumptions formed the sacred dogma of Ultimate Frisbee. But none of them anticipated Shredding—a fully dynamic, perpetual-motion philosophy built around an advanced dribbling system and the Triple Threat Principle.
In the act of shredding, there is no dead moment. There is no assumption of static possession. The game flows in real time. Every catch is a potential continuation of motion, every movement a layering of threat, every fake a legitimate cognitive wedge against the defense. The sport becomes not a relay race of discrete possessions, but a fluid dialectic of relentless leverage.
The Falsifying Instance
What makes Shredding so dangerous to the existing order is not just that it works, but that it works legally—within the very rule set that was presumed to preclude it. In doing so, it reveals that the rules were never airtight, never coherent, never robust enough to constrain someone with true philosophical and kinesthetic insight.
Shredding, as Huguenard practices it, exposes the Dead-Ball // Continuous Play Mashup (DBCPM) as an incoherent artifact—mechanically incompatible and neurologically unstable. The New Games ethos collapses in the face of a system that generates false-positive dopamine loops, competitive acrimony, and the very chaos it claimed to avoid. Self-officiating becomes impossible under the pressure of real-time leverage. SOTG is not elevated; it is evacuated.
The exception, therefore, proves the rule: if one person, acting alone, can dismantle the game’s most sacred assumptions through legal means, then those assumptions were never structurally valid to begin with.
A Philosophy of Equilibrium
What Shredding restores is equilibrium. It eliminates the false stops, the unnatural resets, the neurochemical seesaw of calls and counter-calls. It gives the offense its rightful dynamism and the defense its legitimate opportunity to adjust in real time. Shredding rewards mastery, timing, vision, and endurance—not rule exploitation, interpretation battles, or moral signaling.
It is not just a better offense. It is a truer form of the sport.
A Final Note on Resistance
That Shredding has been met with resistance—ridicule, dismissal, outright hostility—is unsurprising. Systems under existential threat do not welcome their correctives.
They attack them. They label them heretical. But history does not side with orthodoxy; it sides with revelation. And Shredding, as the exception that proves the rule, has already changed the conversation.
It can no longer be unseen. It will not be unwritten.
The game will either evolve to embrace this truth—or continue to wither in denial of it.
For whatever reason, it had to be Frank Huguenard who is the one person who is at the center of this controversy.
In fact, you could argue that it wasn’t Shredding that was the exception to the rule, it was Frank Huguenard.