USA Today Used The NFL's New Horrible Targeting Rule In Just a Bengals-Steelers 1st Half And Found 24 Penalties
The NFL is getting its very own version of it, starting next season. League owners unanimously passed a rule that outlaws lowering the helmet and using it to initiate contact with an opponent.
While the rule has been passed, the league still has to formulate the official language and set a standard for what will be considered a flaggable hit. Right now, this is all we have from the league:
“Lowering the head to initiate contact with the helmet is a foul.”
So how will this affect the game? To get a sense, we reviewed the first-half of the Week 13 Steelers-Bengals game on Monday Night Football and tried to identify as many of these now-illegal hits as we could.
So I talked about yesterday how the NFL actually grew some common sense and did away with the pointless rule that required teams to come on the field for a PAT after a game-ending score. Good job NFL! Well, they’ve reverted course and created the worst rule possible. This new targeting rule will ruin the game of football. Will it make the game safer? Probably, but the game will be almost unwatchable at this point. USA Today did a fantastic study on just the first half of a game between the Bengals and Steelers. Here’s what they found.
Over the course of 75 first-half plays, we found 39 possible penalties on 24 plays. Based on the language above, 22 of those possible penalties were obvious calls, leaving 17 borderline calls.
Running plays will be absolutely ridiculous to call with this new rule. You know how much helmet contact happens on a simple running play?
Running plays were far more likely to include a possible penalty. Of the 24 runs in the first half, 13 plays included a questionable hit. On those 13 plays, we saw 26 possible penalties, 15 of which were deemed “obvious” penalties.
On 43 passes, we saw just 10 plays including at least one questionable hit. Six of those plays included at least one obvious penalty.
Defenders were twice as likely to commit these penalties. We counted 24 possible flags on defensive players compared to 13 for offensive players. The remaining two flags came on one kickoff return.
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So what USA Today found was what we expected. The targeting rule will be change the NFL for the worse and alter how the game is played. If you watch college football every Saturday you know how bad this rule is already. The only way the NFL could make this worse is if they fully adopted the NCAA rule and ejected players. If that were the case I’d expect about a dozen guys to be kicked out of every game. The NCAA targeting rule is abysmal but the NFL one will try its best to rival it. This sucks and I know it’ll make the game safer but the product itself will suffer greatly. If the GIF I used to start this blog is now a 15 yard penalty I’ll be livid and I hope instant replay is allowed to be used to review if a play was “illegal” or not. That in itself will hurt the game and create more replay reviews and longer games, but it’s the only way to help ease this rule in.
Thank God it’s baseball season so we don’t have to think about this for a while but come September we’re in trouble. Fuck the NFL.