The NFL has a new crisis, entirely of its own creation.
In an effort to protect the league’s most precious commodity, the star quarterback, the league has gone too far in its new roughing the passer rule. Clean hits, the textbook type of tackles the league has been urging players to make for years, are now illegal if they involve a quarterback, and games are suffering as a result.
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“Unfortunately this league is going in a direction that a lot of people don’t like, Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews said. “I think they’re getting soft. The only thing hard about this league is the fines they’re laying down on guys like me who play the game hard.”
Matthews has become the poster child for the new rule, having been flagged for roughing the passer once in each of Green Bay’s first three games.
His roughing penalty against Minnesota last week negated what would have been a game-winning interception. And on Sunday, Matthews was penalized for landing on Washington quarterback Alex Smith after a classic pass rush move. Matthews’ head was up — not down, because head-down tackling has been rightfully barred from the game — and he hit Smith in the shoulder with his own shoulder. Matthews didn’t launch himself and he didn’t drive Smith into the turf. He appeared to try to unwrap his arms from Smith’s back and slide himself off the quarterback within moments of landing.
“Obviously when you’re tackling a guy from the front you’re going to land on him. I understand that spirit of the rule, I said that in weeks prior, but when you have a hit like that, that’s a football play,” Matthews said. “I even went up to Alex Smith after the game and asked him, ‘What do you think? What can I do differently?’ Because that’s a football play. Of course, the NFL is going to come back and say I put my body weight on him, but that’s a football play.”
Sure enough, the NFL defended the penalty almost immediately, posting the language of the new roughing rule on Twitter within minutes.
This is a foul for roughing the passer – the defender lands “with all or most of the defender’s weight” on the passer. Rule 12, Section 2, Article 9(b): https://t.co/s9YKN8NLuT pic.twitter.com/ei2QZkvvzx
— NFL Football Operations (@NFLFootballOps) September 23, 2018
But reiterating the language of the rule doesn’t make it a good rule.
This isn’t to say that all hits on the quarterbacks should be fair game, and on Sunday, officials got it right in throwing a flag against Jacksonville’s Malik Jackson for the hit on Tennessee quarterback Blaine Gabbert that knocked Gabbert from the game with a concussion. The penalty was not classified as roughing the passer — Jackson was instead penalized for lowering his helmet to initiate the hit on Gabbert, the new rule that sparked controversy when it was announced before the season, but was fairly utilized here.
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But Sunday’s Week 3 games featured nine roughing the passer penalties, after 21 roughing calls in the first two weeks, and at least two unnecessary roughness flags on the San Francisco 49ers for hits on Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (roughing the passer is called when a player is in the passing posture, i.e. in the pocket).
The roughing tally — specifically the flags for driving a quarterback or landing with body weight — included an iffy call on Raiders’ defensive end Maurice Hurst against Ryan Tannehill, two calls against Cardinals defenders Markus Golden and Robert Nkemdiche on the same third-quarter series against Chicago, and a flag on Dallas’ Tyrone Crawford on what looked like a clean hit on Russell Wilson.
“That was not roughing the passer under the existing rules,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said. “That just was not roughing the passer.”
What appears to be clear is that after three weeks, there is a disconnect between the spirit of the rule change and the application of it.
When NFL officiating crews made their rounds in the preseason, meeting with players, coaches and reporters, the explanation was that the league was trying to outlaw the extra punishment quarterbacks sometimes take at the end of a pressure or a sack, as the league wanted to keep defenders from driving quarterbacks into the turf, a la the hit the Vikings’ Anthony Barr placed on Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers last year that broke Rodgers’ collarbone, and stop them from pancaking passers after they throw a pass. But the roughing rule warranted just a short mention in the 11-minute officiating video shown to teams in the preseason, lumped in with protections for long-snappers on field-goal attempts and for sliding quarterbacks.
“I thought it was clear that basically you have to gator roll the quarterback, but how am I supposed to hit him?,” Broncos outside linebacker Shane Ray said this week. “I can’t hit him high, I can’t hit him low, and if I hit him in the middle ….. I mean, what are you doing?”
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Across the league, teams have been trying to adjust. The biggest challenge, players said, is physics.
Players are grappling with how they’re supposed to change their forward momentum to flip sideways and keep a quarterback from landing beneath him.
“At the end of the day, just take them down and lay them there. Basically that’s what they want us to do,” Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul said.
In Denver, defensive coaches implemented a pass rush drill in which players dive at a tackling dummy and try to roll on its back, like an alligator trying to drown its prey. Defensive tackle Domata Peko, a 13-year veteran, had never practiced that way before. He’s used to using his weight (325 pounds) as an asset for punishing quarterbacks.
“I hate that rule. That rule is horrible,” Peko said. “Like a bigger guy, like Big Ben [Roethlisberger], you’re trying to take him down and you can’t land on him, he’s going to stay up. He’s so big. Or a strong guy like Cam Newton, you have to try to use your whole body weight to take him down, but that’s a penalty? That’s bad, man.”
Still, even a gator roll can fail, as we saw in Miami on Sunday. In response to the roughing rule changes, Dolphins players have also practiced keeping their weight off quarterbacks, and Miami defensive end William Hayes executed what officials viewed as a clean hit on Raiders quarterback Derek Carr. In an effort to not pancake Carr, Hayes kicked his leg out and got his foot caught in the grass as he made contact with Carr, and suffered a season-ending ACL injury in the process.
“He’s one of our leaders, one of the best guys in the locker room, one of the best run defenders,” Dolphins coach Adam Gase said Monday morning. “Tough to swallow.”
And yet, for all the efforts to protect quarterbacks, the NFL cannot legislate injuries out of the game — even for the league’s most important players.
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The 49ers believe they have lost franchise quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo for the season to a torn anterior cruciate ligament, following a play in which Garoppolo was scrambling, and chose to fight for more yards on his feet rather than step out of bounds. Garoppolo’s left knee buckled without contact.
Last season, Texans quarterback Deshuan Watson tore his ACL on a non-contact play in practice, and Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz’s 2017 ACL injury came on a legal hit, outside of the pocket.
What’s the next step for the NFL to protect quarterbacks from injury? Make pass rushers count to five, just like in your backyard touch game on Thanksgiving?
“They want the quarterback not to be punished,” Broncos head coach Vance Joseph said. “Back when I played, that was the key to the game: how much can you punish the quarterback. It’s changed. They want you to sack the quarterback and turn your body and not put your full body weight on the guy. I understand it, it’s for the safety of the position. It’s fair.”
Joseph said he’s coaching his pass rushers to aim for the ball in the quarterback’s hand, believing that if the defender is going for the strip, he’ll be able to avoid making that sort of full-body punishing contact the league is trying to ban.
That’s exactly what Matthews thinks his next adjustment will be, because the change he made between Week 2 to 3 — the attempt at a gator roll — failed.
“When he gives himself up as soon as you hit him, your body weight is going to go on him,” Matthews said. “I think we’re looking for the hits that took Aaron out last year. A little extra.
“If I wanted to hurt him, I could have. I could’ve put some extra on it. But that’s football. So I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
(Photo: Mark Goldman/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)