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If we're going to talk about low hits that should be banned, the first thing to go should be the chop block, an extremely dangerous double-team block in which (usually) a defender is first engaged above the waist and then blocked below the waist when he can't see the low block coming or prepare for it. At every other level of play this is illegal at any time because it's a knee-destroyer, but in the NFL:quote:Rule 12-2-3 Of course, it's not skill position players who are on the receiving end of these blocks, so they don't get much attention.
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Dec 3, 2015 03:18
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:09 |
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As I see it, there are two ways of doing this: the "Steal rugby laws" way, in which you go "what does rugby do? let's do that"; or the "Modify football rules" way, in which you tweak the rules of football to make the big hit less appealing while not leaving your tweaks open to people going "aha but rugby is TWO DIFFERENT SPORTS so there is NOTHING we can POSSIBLY learn from them". So here are some ideas that might possibly be adapted to football. Rugby union's definition of a tackle, emphasis mine: quote:A tackle occurs when the ball carrier is held by one or more opponents and is brought to ground. This goes one step further than down by contact, in which any contact however incidental on a runner counts. The rule would be changed to require an opponent to be physically holding an opponent when he goes to the ground, otherwise he isn't down and can get up again and continue playing. This, in theory, would encourage players to tackle properly rather than throwing shoulders everywhere. On the other hand, it might well encourage players to dive onto opponents who are on or near the ground to make sure they've been tackled, and I can see it being very hard to make an officiating judgement between "that was a fair enough hit, you couldn't be sure he was going to break the tackle at the last moment" and "that was unnecessary roughness, you should have known he was going to be held on the ground". The rules did originally in the dim and distant past require players to be firmly held on the ground by an opponent and were changed to discourage defenders piling onto runners to make sure they were good and stopped. The other problem here is universality. If I'm an NFL coach I want players coming into my game who have the proper skills; of course in NCAA and high school rules, a runner is down when he's down, no matter whether he was touched or not. I don't see either rules committee abandoning that to bring back a rule that was originally got rid of for player safety reasons, and if they don't do it and the NFL does, now those NFL coaches have to teach seasoned kids a whole new tackling technique when they turn pro. Next, the shoulder charge law. quote:A player must not charge or knock down an opponent carrying the ball without trying to grasp that player. This sounds simple, but there is an obvious argument against it: in almost all shoulder charges I've seen, the tackler immediately tries to argue "I was trying to get my arms in but I hit him so hard he went down before I could grab him", and in a significant proportion of those cases, he's at least got a point worth arguing. The difference between a shoulder charge and a tackle that knocks the runner down before he can be grasped is often extremely narrow. This tackle, for instance. (Which if it happened in football in exactly those circumstances would almost certainly be called as kick catch interference.) The commentator says "no arms" on the first replay, but on the replay from behind the catcher at ~1:00 there certainly looks like an arm going round the back attempting to wrap but missing; and no penalty was awarded. You could argue that one all week; it's far from simple and uncontroversial. (Besides which, it's cool when there's a crack of pads after a big shoulder and two players hammer to the ground and then the runner bounces up again after a second. It could well be argued that this is one of the main benefits of having players wear hard pads in the first place.) There is a third law that might be considered that's specifically relevant to defenders attacking a receiver's knees. quote:A player must not tackle an opponent whose feet are off the ground. This is perhaps more practical to introduce than it might have been twenty years ago before going to the ground was a Thing, but there is one relatively obvious counter-argument; it's a lot easier to not hit someone in the head when he's in mid-air than it is when he's returning to the ground and therefore must be on a downwards trajectory. (Of course, if you're going to require the defender to wrap as well, maybe that equation changes.) So that's rugby laws you might want to bring in; but there could be another way, which is to change the rules we've got. Blocking below the waist. I think the current NCAA rule has things about right: there's nothing unreasonably dangerous about a low block at low to medium speed that the defender sees coming. It's virtually impossible now to blindside someone or hit them low at high speed and it to be legal in college and the NFL would do well to reconsider the whole IBW question again. I do think it would probably be an idea to have a blanket ban on blocks at the knees or below against a defenseless player; shoulder-to-thigh on a receiver still seems like a big enough area that defenders would be able to adjust again over the next few years like they've had to adjust to not hitting the head. Now, I think the main reason players go for the big hit so often is because they don't actually have that much of an incentive to wrap. You could force them to wrap, but there is another option - significantly modify the forward progress rule in some way. If a receiver could catch a pass 1 yard across the line to gain, and then be wrapped and driven back behind it, and the defender be given credit for pushing the ball-carrier back, surely that becomes a much more attractive option than going for the big hit to knock the ball loose, which at present is the only way you're going to stop that receiver getting a first down. Again, this is far from simple; you wouldn't want this turning into a licence for mass-momentum plays with half a dozen players from each team trying to push the ballcarrier back and forward, that's one of the things that had the President threatening to ban football a hundred years ago. You'd need to think very carefully about how many players could be in the tackle before the ball became dead, whether it would be a good idea to do as Rugby League does and say the tackle is completed if a team-mate of the ballcarrier lends his weight to the pile, or if the ballcarrier's legs are lifted or held off the ground. I could also see an exception of some sort to stop this happening to quarterbacks, especially if it's the NFL making the rule. You'd also need to consider whether it wouldn't be too easy to force a fumble from a ballcarrier who was being pushed back in that way (again, Rugby League only permits the ball to be stolen like that in a one-on-one tackle for exactly that reason). On a related topic: there's an extremely interesting idea that's being unofficially floated in high school rules circles at the moment. Some people have been suggesting that any block against a defenseless (or possibly just a blindsided player, they're still trying to work the kinks out) should have to be made with the force coming from open hands as a push block rather than with the shoulder or body. I'm going to be keeping an eye out for how that progresses, if it does at all.
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Dec 4, 2015 14:12
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