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Sunday Football: NFL Rule Changes Coming?

Posted by JAZZ SHAW, Assistant Editor in At TMV.
Oct 4th, 2009 | Comments

With Sunday football back upon us, it’s a good time to ask about the potential for more rules changes being considered currently by the NFL. The rules in the NFL change only at a glacial pace which is generally a good thing. You don’t want to mess too much with a winning formula. But they do change on occasion. Some have been minor tweaks with varying levels of success. A few have been really boneheaded moves which were later abandoned, but some have been truly spectacular. (The advent of the forward pass is widely considered the greatest innovation and achievement of the 20th century, though penicillin and the moon landing are a close second and third.)

One of the biggest bones of contention is the current issue of altering the overtime rules. Should the starting kickoff position (currently the 30 yard line) be changed? More controversially, should the game end after the first score by either team? Some are saying that this gives an unfair advantage to the winner of the coin toss, since they only need a field goal to win and the other team then gets no chance to respond. By the same token, opponents of the change point out that if your defense isn’t good enough to stop the other team short of field goal territory when the chips are down, you really didn’t deserve to win anyway. What do you think?

The Jets (3-0) meet one of the other undefeated teams in the league today, the New Orleans Saints. Those of us in New York above Dutchess County will unfortunately be treated to the craptastic Bills playing the even more craptastic Dolphins because of stupid NFL and network broadcast agreements. (I’m putting in a Jets widget below, though, so you can at least follow the score.) I am holding on to hope and will pick the Jets defense to keep the Saints off the field and beat them in a low scoring grinder of a game.

Elsewhere in the league, I’ll take Green Bay over the Vikings on Monday night to prove that Favre is still past his expiration date. I’ll also pick Baltimore in a blowout over the deadbeat Patriots, the Titans to pick up their first win over the Jaguars and the Pittsburgh Steel Curtain to continue to rust and lose to the San Diego Chargers.

Your picks?

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shannonlee

Saints, Vikes, Pats.Chargers :)

Leonidas

Sudden death is fine, you don't like the way it works, win in regulation.

tidbits

Always liked Jack Ham's proposed rule change that, given the obsession with protecting quarterbacks, QB's should be required to wear skirts.

Leonidas

Jack Lambert, not Jack Ham..

tidbits

Thanks for the correction. It was a long time ago and for some reason I thought it was Jack Ham. To Lambert goes the credit.

DLS

Sudden death in football, as in hockey, makes no sense. It's intriguing as a derivative or variant of the games in question, given the special kind or quality of play that may be attributed to it specifically, but otherwise, it merits no consideration. Any sport or game that has a time limit controlling length of play should feature overtime that also consists of one or more additional timed periods. With football it should be extra quarters. Sudden death obviously violates this precept. High-interest or high-excitement alternatives (that raise the specter of cheap-thrills gimmickry) such as the method used now for college overtime are also inferior and should be avoided, but if enough people demand such kinds of entertainment, these alternatives (successive attempts at scoring from somewhere around the 25-30 yard line of the opposition, or from a chosen side of the field) could be considered.

More generally appropriate (to the entire game, not only to overtime) is to repair the rules that place the offensive linemen at a disadvantage and force them to concede the initiative to the defense, such as either holding restrictions (put the same restrictions on the defense -- only allow holding of the person possessing the football, in other words) or the prohibition on advancing downfield (interfering with pass plays and rendering linemen ineligible for passes). The initiative should be possed fully and only by the offense. The problems faced by the offensive linemen suffer from this fundamental defect in the current rules.

Cleaning up the rules about forward passes and ending the too-pristine treatment of receivers would be welcomed as well by those who value good play over quick, cheap thrills associated with excess passing. (Rushing, not passing, is the soul of football.) Sadly, that is unlikely to happen given how popular passing has become. Easing the hyper-guarding of the quarterback would also be welcome, but may also not fare well.

About the only other thing that might be considered is something too impractical and expensive to ever be treated seriously, much less tried, but merits mention here -- reviewing the dimensions of the field with the consideration that a longer and (especially) wider field would be of value (particularly if rushing were to be favored by rules changes at the expense of passing). Field dimension changes are something meriting attention not only in US football but in soccer (international football)*, hockey, and other sports; people are larger and faster than they were generations ago when dimensions were chosen, possibly arbitrarily.

* For soccer, I've thought about a world-class field arranged to classic proportions, approximately 127+ meters long and 83+ or so meters wide (I don't have the numbers with me as I post this), which yield a classically-proportioned field of 10,000 hectares.

DLS

By the way, Jazz, on a question some people may have, who should play against whom? I worked out the best way to do this, which would retain divisions (of the entire field, of teams) but which would feature divisions whose composition changed every year. (The ideal setup I came up with was based on a multi-year "rolling" performance-based measure for assigning teams to divisions.) These better divisions would be of equal overall playing strength but also would each be set up so that you had all kinds of teams, from the strongest to the weakest, in each division (rather than averages derived from some divisions of all average teams, other divisions solely of top- and bottom-ranked teams). There are variants that could be used instead, such as having divisions consisting of a partial "fixed" component (same teams in the division every year) and other teams assigned to the divisions to ensure even seeding, or divisions consisting of paired fixed sub-divisions, et cetera. The basic idea is to correctly seed each division each year (season), as each playing season is, of course, a tournament.

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