Coming out of the NFL owners meetings, the biggest headline will probably be the new “Hines Ward Rule” about downfield blocking, but the rule change that irks me the most as a football fan is the “Tom Brady Rule.”
From Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
While not an actual rule change requiring a vote from NFL owners, the league also ruled that defenders who are knocked to the ground can no longer “lunge” into quarterbacks if the play is still ongoing. The change comes about one season removed from 2007 NFL MVP Tom Brady’s injury in the season’s first game that resulted from such a play.
There are a few reasons that I absoultely loathe this change.
First off, if that injury happens to Tavaris Jackson or even Ben Roethlisberger, there’s no new rule about lunging into quarterbacks. Maybe I’m being nitpicky here, but every player should be treated equally when it comes to this stuff. You can probably go through the past five years and find at least a half dozen of knee tears on similar plays to the Brady injury, but because it happened to Tom Brady and the “unstoppable” Patriots, the league must have done something wrong with the rules!!11!111
I have more respect and admiration for Brady than a lot of Steeler fans. He’s possibly the greatest quarterback to ever play in the NFL. But before he’s a quarterback, he’s a football player. Football players get hurt. Such is the sport. To adjust the rules because one player got hurt is ridiculous.
One of my other gripes is that it is going to be hard to enforce. There’s a very fine line between a “lunge” and a “dive” or whatever else you want to call it. When bodies go down at full speed during a pass rush, it’s pure chaos. It is going to be really tough on the refs to watch for stuff like this when there’s three or four huge men all within a couple yards. My money is that by week two somebody will get called for “lunging” and it will be far from it.
Lastly, and Jack Lambert would be proud, quarterbacks already get too much protection. Ben Roethlisberger gets thrown around and beat up more than anybody else in the league, and as much as I hate it, I don’t think it shouldn’t belong in the game. The string of penalties called on the Steeler this year for hits on quarterbacks were jaw-droppingly stupid. LaMarr Woodley was fined for throwing Jason Campbell down in an intimidating manner! Seriously, NFL?!
In another decade, would anybody be really suprised if quarterbacks wear flags instead of pads? Or only a certain number of linebackers can blitz?
That may seem a little extreme, but did anybody think there would be a rule for “lunging” or fines for intimidation 20 years ago?
The NFL is responsible for protecting its players, and I am fine with that, but they are getting dangerously close to completely altering the game one pansy rule at a time.
Let quarterbacks go out there and play and let them go out and get hurt. That’s why they get paid millions of dollars every week.
