Wrapping up three days in humid, sticky, beautiful Palm Beach County …
• Coming into the NFL’s annual meeting, I wondered where commissioner Roger Goodell stood on the Philadelphia Eagles’ infamous push play. Coming out of it, I feel like I’ve got my answer: He’d like to find a way to take it out of the game.
Generally, when Goodell doesn’t have the votes—and via a straw poll, he wasn’t particularly close this time around—but wants to spend some time figuring out a way to get them, he’ll table a proposal, like he did the Green Bay Packers’ tush push ban, until the May meeting. In this case, I do think the lack of needed support for the play went back to two things.
First, there was the narrow way the proposal itself was written. As we detailed Monday afternoon, both New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh raised problems with the rule’s definition of the play, as pushing behind the center. Vrabel asked whether the quarterback could be pushed behind the guard. Harbaugh asked whether the guards could be pushed by extra linemen on the field to create a similar effect to the quarterback being pushed.
Second, there was the feeling among some teams that one team’s mastery of a play should not lead to a rule banning it. There’s the obvious angle to that, that doing so would be a noncompetitive way of managing a new element of the game. There’s also the precedent it could set going forward to be careful of.
So I thought Rich McKay’s strategy to keep the discussion alive Tuesday, as I’d heard it, was interesting. He asked how many teams would like to take a closer look at how the rule was written in 2004, before a ban of pushing or pulling a teammate was repealed, and then double back on the topic in May. Somewhere around 20 teams were in favor of doing that.
It was a smart play by the league, because it’s a different writing of the rule, and it also points out that the rule being taken off the books 20 years ago had nothing to do with how Philly is taking advantage of the lack of one. The elimination of the rule actually happened because it had become difficult to officiate downfield when an offensive player would crash into a scrum, and it was tough to delineate whether he was blocking a defender or simply pushing his teammate across the line for extra yardage, a first down or a touchdown.
Anyway, that the vote wasn’t particularly close to getting the 24 votes needed to ban the push play, and that Goodell and the competition committee forged ahead toward May with this tells me that the commissioner wants the push play banned in some way.
• One reason why, of course, is health and safety. Dr. Allen Sills told the owners, GMs and coaches that while there isn’t injury data supporting the idea that the play is unsafe for the quarterbacks or line, he does believe that when there is an injury on such a play, because of the posture of the players on it, there could be a catastrophic head or spine injury.
One thing I do want to clean up from my Monday evening column was how Eagles GM Howie Roseman addressed the room on this one. We reported in the story that Roseman asked the room for injury data supporting the idea that the play should be banned. Failing that, he then asked for data proving it was more dangerous than a conventional sneak play.
I should add here that Roseman’s larger point was that if this is truly a health and safety question, then the Eagles were all ears—and would always want to do what’s in the best interest of the players as a whole in that department. He was pressing for more specifics. Another question he asked, I’m told, was what difference there was in the quarterback’s posture on the tush push vs. a conventional sneak. Sills answered that there wasn’t one.
This is another example of just how complicated this has all gotten.
• I’ve heard the Detroit Lions’ proposal—to seed the four division champions and three wild cards in each conference—only had a handful of teams in support when a straw poll was taken in the room Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead.
And there’s a big motivator for the league to keep working on this, and that’s the level of competition at the end of the regular season. The feeling I got from talking to people is that there’s concern that, with more seeding locked in early in this format, and the grind of a 17-game season apparent, more and more coaches were managing the players through Weeks 17 and 18 if they didn’t have a lot to compete for. Obviously, that affected the level of play.
Part of the idea of open seeding is that it would make it less likely that teams would punt on the final weeks of the regular season to be fresh for the playoffs. The 10-win Los Angeles Rams took that sort of strategy to Week 18 last year, and it sure looked like it worked, with their playoff win over the 14-win Minnesota Vikings (beaten up from a war with the Lions for the NFC North title in Week 18) coming the following week.
This idea, of course, could become even more of a factor when the league goes to 18 games at some point down the line.
• I wouldn’t read much into the delay on the onside kick voting. I think that’s more about vetting the unintended consequences of allowing it earlier in the game than just the fourth quarter.
One would be that there might not be enough of a consequence to failing to convert one, with the touchback line moved up to the 35, and more returns, presumably, coming into the game. I do think we’ll get another vote on this in May, and something will be pushed through.
• I sat in Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank’s press availability Tuesday, and I will say one takeaway for me would be that while he does have some sympathy for Kirk Cousins, who just wants to go play somewhere, the line about handling this as a business matter is real.
I’ve said it before. I really don’t think he likes the idea of paying $90 million for a single year of Cousins, and he sees having the quarterback insurance as worth paying for unless someone gives Atlanta something to move off its spot. And I do think that could be coming over draft weekend, once we have clarity on who takes which quarterback where in the draft.
• Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is really good for the NFL in a lot of ways, but sometimes he can’t get out of his own way—and I think what he said about agent David Mulugheta’s involvement in the Micah Parsons saga is a prime example of it. There was zero reason to pick that fight with one of the game’s most influential agents.
We’re going to be talking about Parsons’s situation for a while.
• It’s hard not to have an appreciation for Calais Campbell, who’s returning to the Arizona Cardinals now for his 18th NFL season. It’s cool that he’ll get this full-circle opportunity to finish his career where it started. It’s also amazing he’s lasted that long at defensive end. It says a lot about who he is as a professional and a person.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Roger Goodell May Have Telegraphed He Wants to Ban the Tush Push.
