Skip to content

Ad Disclosure

Eagles

The NFL’s New Helmet Rule Might be a Disaster

Kevin Kinkead

By Kevin Kinkead

Published:

Let’s play a game.

It’s called, “penalty, or not a penalty?”

We’re talking about the new NFL policy which bars players from lowering their helmet to strike an opponent. The new rule comes with a 15 yard penalty and can be paired with an ejection based on these standards:

  • Player lowers his helmet to establish a linear body posture prior to initiating and making contact with the helmet
  • Unobstructed path to his opponent
  • Contact clearly avoidable and player delivering the blow had other options

We now have a decent sample size of plays to look at after one week of preseason games, so let’s go through social media and see what we can find, starting with this hit from Cardinals safety Travell Dixon:

Looks pretty fair to me. I don’t see him lowering the helmet and establishing “a linear body position.” It looks like a textbook tackle, as the tweeter explains.

It’s hard to get good still shots at the point of contact, since the motion makes the image very blurry, but here’s what I was able to clip:

Yeah, I mean, it looks to me like he tries to keep his head up as he’s coming through on that tackle.

The Hall of Fame game between the Bears and Ravens contained four plays where flags came out for the new rule.

Here’s the clip:

Any issue with those? I think the first two were pretty clear cases, while the third and fourth were a little iffy. Especially on the third play, when the receiver is above the defender, I’m not sure how else he can launch himself upward without leading with his helmet in some way, shape, or form.

But here are the stills from the point of contact:

Agree? Disagree?

I think the upper body position in stills 1 and 2 looks more questionable than in images 3 and 4.

Here’s another example, where a running back lowers his head and gets low to avoid having his legs cut out from under him. That results in the safety coming in low with the helmet for a penalty:

Schwartz, a former NFL offensive lineman, is right. It’s really impossible for the safety to adjust or change what he’s doing in that scenario.

Here’s the still:

I have a feeling that we’re going to see a lot of those types of moments this season.

Another example –

If you watched the Birds play the Steelers the other night, you saw Sidney Jones become the first Eagle to get popped for 15 yards under the new rules.

He was flagged for lowering his head on this play in the second quarter:

“You have to see what you hit.”

Yeah, Mike Mayock is right. Jones doesn’t have to lower his helmet there, he has “other options,” and Rasul Douglas already has the guy wrapped up anyway.

Image:

Let’s do one more, a clip pulled by NFL analytics guy Warren Sharp.

In this play below, you see four different instances of lowering the helmet – two from the offense and two from the defense, yet no penalty flags were thrown:

Here’s who could have been penalized on that play:

The pulling lineman and initial defender –

Two penalties right there, yeah?

And how about the running back and the second defender? –

Two more penalties? Yes? No?

So we really should have four penalties total, which offset and give us a replay of down.

My first thought from watching the opening batch of preseason games is that the arbitrary nature of refereeing is going to be an issue here. Officiating units might call the penalty in different ways until there’s more experience with the new rule. Tackling might not change until players get used to it.

Either way, it looks like an unmitigated disaster so far.

Kevin Kinkead
Kevin Kinkead

Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com

Advertise With Us