One Fake Game Into the Season and the Helmet Rule is Already Creating Mass Confusion
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“The helmet rule is going to be a great rule. That’s a direction that we coach – we already coach that way to get it out of the game. I think 95 percent of the coaches in this league coach that way, and the other five percent have to get on board.” – John Harbaugh in May
“I probably didn’t see them as well as you guys did, so I would just have to wait to see the TV copies and see what they look like. So I really don’t have any comment on it. I really don’t know. If I knew I’d give you an opinion on it, but I don’t know enough about the rule to understand it right now and comment on it.” – John Harbaugh after his team took two Helmet Rule flags last night
So we’ve had one game in our brave, new world now that the NFL Rules Committee has defined what a defender can and cannot do with his helmet. And what does this idyllic, concussion-free utopia look like after Beta testing the new rule under fake football conditions? Chaos. Anarchy. Instead of being one giant leap closer to cure for CTE and insuring that pro football players will live longer than Ents and with wizard brains until the day they die, it’s a jumbled mess. A ball of confusion in which no one on the field, defender, receiver, official or Harbaugh, knows what is and isn’t a penalty.
I’m sure Harbaugh didn’t mind getting the ball at the 1 here. But is there a Mike Perreira anywhere out there who can explain to us what Nick Orr did that he shouldn’t? Or didn’t do that he should have?
He timed his jump. Got there when the ball did. Had his head off to the side. Led with his shoulder. Knocked the ball loose. That to me not only looked legal, it looked like the kind of clip you use when officials go around to camps showing examples of what’s allowed. Hell, I’d put that in a coaching video for youth football. It’s textbook.
By no means am I against trying to make the game safer. This is not some purist bullshit or fake machismo about the game’s getting soft and men used to be men and let’s put dresses on them or anything of the kind. Junior Seau was made of pure testosterone and the game killed him. Steps have to be taken or football as we know it will go the way of greyhound racing. But to pull that off they need rules that make sense. That are clear, defined and understandable. This is the furthest thing from it.
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I think we’re all just hoping that this is just them over-calling it in the early going just to get the point across the fooling around it pretty much over, they’re super serious so knock it off, guys, they really mean it this time. But if this is how it’s going to be going forward, it’s going to make games practically unwatchable. Decided more by the official’s calls than by the players. Because when anything can be a penalty, everything will be a penalty.