The NFL has changed the rules to generally prohibit players from lowering their helmets to initiate contact. Plenty of players are concerned about the practical impact of this rule change on the game. On Tuesday, several Bills players explained their position to ESPN.
“Hopefully they go back and realize it’s not going to be a functional rule that’s going to make sense,” Bills linebacker Lorenzo Alexander told ESPN. “It’s going to be hard on the refs, because they already have enough rules to call. Now, do they call it every single play, which they can do?”
The fundamental problem comes from the fact that football players don’t want to play the game standing straight upright like, well, foosball players.
“It’s definitely going to be hard, because our heads are at the top of our body,” Alexander said. “You play with forward lean. Even if I’m coming in with a shoulder, if [the offensive player] drops his head a little bit, it’s slight helmet-to-helmet. It can be called every single play. I just don’t think it was well thought out. The intention of the rule is great, but we have to understand at some point, this is a collision, contact sport. And I think that’s some of the allure to it. Everybody is not built to play this game. You can’t legislate out every injury. Then we wouldn’t be playing football. At that point, it changes to something different. If the fans and the owners are OK with that, then we’ll have to live in that new world.”
Until, of course, someone starts up the Old-School Football League, embracing the way football used to be played with players who gladly will play it that way. Unless a league like that emerges, pro football players will need to adjust.
“I actually had an incident in the playoff game [against Jacksonville when] the trainers didn’t like how I tackled on a few plays,” Bills safety Micah Hyde told ESPN. “My response to them was just the running back was running at me, and he’s getting as low as he can and lowering his shoulder, lowering his helmet. I have to make a tackle. I’m not going to stand straight up, because he’s going to run straight through my chest.”
Bils defensive tackle Kyle Williams supports reasonable efforts to make the game safer, but he realizes that the rule as written can create major issues.
“I understand the old rule of targeting and launching, but this seems to incorporate all contact, including incidental contact, which I think is a huge problem for players,” Williams told ESPN. “There is a risk that comes with playing the game, generally speaking. You can legislate out the flagrant attempts to use the helmet as a weapon, but the reason we wear helmets is because of incidental contact and just the nature of the game.”
Drawing the line between incidental contact with the head and deliberate use of the head will be hard to do, especially with little or no guidance from the league as to what the new rule specifically prohibits.