It might have sounded like a worthy idea when it was first mooted in whichever mahogany room hosted its birth, but there have been few football innovations as fundamentally nonsensical as the sin bin.
Far from the flashbulbs and fanfare of Big Football, the sin bin has been in operation this season at all levels up to Step 5 of the National League System, as well as up to the third tier of the women's game.
Its one and only application is to punish and therefore deter dissent. It's a noble goal, certainly, and at the end of the season - whenever that turns out to be - we will be told of its unmitigated, proven success.
It has, they will say, reduced instances of dissent throughout non-league football, and therein we find the lie upon which the entire concept of the sin bin has been constructed.
In these leagues the count by which dissent will be measured this season is the number of players sent to the sidelines for their ten minutes of stretching and thinking about what they've done.
That number will be lower than last season's tally for the same offence. But the idea that the sin bin has been effective is a fallacy. It's a fantasy, yet its propagation will not be restricted its arm's-length relationship with the truth.
One of the few consistencies in how the new rule has been applied this season is the reluctance of referees to send a player to the bench for their first offence, such is the severity of the penalty.
Week after week players are now receiving a warning where previously no warning would have been given. Instead, a yellow card was issued. Nobody is measuring the use of this new get-out clause.
Notwithstanding that rather obvious hole in the data, the sin bin has been dreadfully enforced and thus is a wholly useless weapon against the one problem it's supposed to tackle.
What the rule's thin veneer of reported success attempts to shield is the multitude of ways in which the sin bin has become farcical even inside its first season.
Its most basic failing is that it's failing. The sin bin has had no positive effect whatsoever on the scourge of dissent and the teams who've made it the core of the game plan for years are still at it week in and week out, unabated.
Indeed, it appears that a number of referees have unilaterally and completely elected to exempt themselves from their obligation to use the sin bin.
The result is that it's impossible to predict from match to match whether dissent will be allowed. Not that the players care; they don't seem to take the potential punishment into account either way.
Critics of the sin bin can list any number of curious incidents the new rule has created this season. I've seen a few myself.
The binning of a goalkeeper is quite rightly baked into the rule, but it makes for quite the spectacle nevertheless. Then again, I've also seen a few goalkeepers escape censure for the same behaviour.
There was a match in which the referee appeared to give the home team their freebie - sorry, their warning - and then send a visiting player to the sin bin without extending the same courtesy to him.
Not long after that, a player in another match simply ignored the referee's decision amid a barrage of noise and handbags from both teams, correctly believing that the official would retreat in the chaos.
I've also seen the sin bin transform a football match into an ice hockey game. When my own team were down to ten men already, a player was sin binned at half time.
The first ten minutes of the second half took the form of a quite extraordinary in-game attack versus defence exercise, a bizarre footballing power play situation. When the tenth man returned, the match regained its normal flow.
Dissent is a problem, of that there is no doubt. I'd question whether it warrants a punishment that can dismantle a match in such a way.
These are just a few of the examples I can vouch for from my own experiences. Some of them are unavoidable and acceptable effects of the rule, arguably the entertaining fruits of its deterrent framework for dissent.
Others are less desirable, but all have one truth in common: they have not reduced dissent. Any Saturday afternoon at non-league football will prove that, as long as you're paying attention.
Instead, we have an unworkable reality in which the punishment for dissent ranges wildly from a player being sent off for ten minutes to, well, absolutely nothing.
Referees at the level I watch most regularly have always struggled to get a grip on this offence and now they just struggle with it in a slightly different way.
It's frustrating to see. Nobody likes dissent. Referees shouldn't have to put up with it and I wonder why they do.
Before the sin bin experiment goes any further - and to be clear, I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea so long as it's somehow measured more honestly and applied equally by every referee in every game - perhaps we should instead encourage the referees to deploy the sanction that was already at their disposal.
If they won't wave a yellow card for clear dissent offences, they won't be in a hurry to do anything that can affect a match as drastically as a sin bin.
Regardless of the ins and outs and ons and offs of this season's sin bin experiment, the raw fact of the matter is that dissent is as present as it was a year ago.
Fudging the numbers on a technicality isn't going to solve that, nor will it convince anyone that it's already been solved.
The non-league game is being asked to take dissent seriously. It's been cast as the lab rat for this innovation.
But if the people in positions of power are willing to blindly believe that X equals Y, perhaps they're the ones who need to reflect properly on the issue at hand.
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Chris Nee
@SphinxFtbl