re: Is "cramp defense" cowardly?

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I don't see a difference between that and playing HUNH all game because you can't man up

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I think out of the two the HUNH is much better for the game of football.

Not only does it introduce parity among teams (aka more people have a reason to care about the sport), but it uses the rules of the game within the game to win (just speeded up). The only people who feel cheated when they lose to a HUNH team are the over talented bluebloods who feel it is their right to dominate the sport (even to the detriment of the sport) because of their talent.

Meanwhile a cramp defense hurts the whole sport because it damages the legitimacy of results in the eyes of most fans. They see it as cheating, especially when their less talented team (let's be honest most teams in the sport don't have a chance talent-wise without tricks like HUNH) loses its opportunity to even the stakes when injuries are faked by the talented team.

Both sides abuse some part of the rulebook, it comes down to what is being abused to get there.

HUNH abuses the fact that the offense has control over when the ball is snapped, which is a power the offense always had. In that way it is existing within the rules of the game, it was just an advantage never really utilized till now.

Cramp Defense abuses the fact that we are extra careful about people being hurt in football, sometimes for liability reasons. Technically a defense could have always faked injuries, but that isn't football it's theater. This isn't professional wrestling or soccer, football fans don't have sympathy for theatrics (which is why touchdown celebrations are extinct).

It is the difference between someone not reporting the sales tax on their online orders vs someone hiding their money away in the Caymen Islands. Both are tax cheats, but only the elites have access to offshore accounts and so there is less sympathy for that sort of cheating. There might be some people that get pissed that online sales tax isn't reported, but again it's mostly just the elites who own local retail stores who have to compete pricewise with taxless online offerings (and who might have their own offshore account).

There is no real way to stop one kind of cheating vs another so the HUNH is probably dead as a concept, but with its death also dies a chance for the sport to be more popular and for the results to be considered more legitimate and less manufactured.