Let’s get it back to the Eagles.

We interrupt your Coronavirus programming to deliver a bit of football news, this involving the rule change proposals submitted to the NFL. The Eagles suggested four of these:

The overtime rule should have been changed years ago, since the NFL OT continues to be the worst in all of the professional sports by a very large margin. I wrote it in January of last year after we got dicked out of seeing Patrick Mahomes respond to a Patriots touchdown drive in the AFC Championship game.

Jeffrey Lurie actually has been interested in changing OT rules for a while now, and said this about overtime in March of 2019 at the NFL annual meeting:

I would like to change overtime. We talked a lot to the competition committee about changing overtime. There’s a lot of ways to do it. Personally, I don’t like the shortened overtime in the regular season because I think it gives even more value to the winner of the coin toss. So if you get the ball first, and you have a seven minute drive or nine minute drive, that’s taking up 70% to 90% of the time period of regular season overtime now. It makes no sense to me. Some day I hope we can get that changed.

There are a lot of ways, I think another possibility is try to avoid the coin toss and have other mechanisms (to determine possession). One of the ideas I floated was the team that scores the most touchdowns (in regulation) has the advantage of getting the ball first. Often it will be a tie, but those times when you score more touchdowns, we award that. You want to avoid a coin toss as best you can, I think.

I’m also a fan of the Eagles going XFL on us with the 4th and 15 idea. Adds another tactical wrinkle to the game instead of trying to literally kick the ball into the ground and then jump on it. The blindside block rule needs attention as well.

More than anything, I can appreciate the Eagles being active in this regard and making suggestions that they feel will improve the game. I tip my cap to their progressive nature.