It's Official: You May Not Tackle.

Stop hurting our guys

Thanks for reading. You can keep The Dope going by upgrading to a Paid subscription, which includes everything we post, not just the freebies. If you’re already an Insider, you rule.

---

The NFL owners on Monday unanimously approved another restriction on tackling, which in and of itself doesn’t register as the most egregiously reactionary thing in the world.

It’s just, you know…starting to add up.

Technically, all the owners did was agree that swivel-hip-drop tackling ought to be against the rules. That’s a lot of words, swivel-hip-drop tackling. Let me shortcut it: This is an old rugby maneuver that has come into vogue in the NFL, and the league is alarmed by it.

Put simply, a defensive player who pulls a hip-drop is going to 1.) wrap his hands or arms around the ballcarrier and then 2.) “unweight himself,” in the NFL parlance, “by swiveling and dropping his hips and/or lower body, landing on and trapping the runner's leg(s) at or below the knee."

Great! Everybody caught up?

---

In searching for some video to share with you to better illustrate what the NFL is trying to outlaw, I was struck by the amount of footage that just plain got it wrong. Note for amateur sports journalists posting to YouTube: A lift-and-body-slam by a tackler is pretty dangerous, but that’s definitely not the rule we’re talking about.

Instead, here is a concise video explainer from the National Rugby League:

---

So it’s a fairly injury-inducing move — I guess. An NFL vice president noted that the league documented 230 instances of the swivel-hip-drop maneuver being used during games last season, and he said that 15 players wound up missing time as a result of being tackled that way.

Those are the sort of numbers that, absent any context whatsoever, don’t mean anything. I have no idea, and the league hasn’t shared, how many NFL players missed time last season as the result of any other type of tackling maneuver — a body-slam, a helmet-to-shoulder launch, a gang tackle, etc.

NFL executive Troy Vincent claimed the hip-drop is a play “that has 20 to 25 times the injury rate” of other types of tackles. That sounds scary. Alas, no statistical documentation to back that up has been made public.

Further, the NFL Players Association — the union that protects and defends players’ rights, safety and security — is strongly against the banning of this tackling move, saying in part that the new prohibition will cause confusion among defenders, officials and fans as to how they can even legally tackle a guy.

The union basically wanted the league to pause and reconsider, but that is absolutely not how the NFL rolls. When it comes to this sort of thing, the league shoots first and asks questions later.

---

---

What we’re witnessing is an ongoing game of whack-a-mole, only the mole is NFL defenders trying to figure out a new way to tackle players who are bigger, faster and stronger than at any time in professional history. The league, meanwhile, waits for a new technique to emerge and then figures out whether or not to kill it.

This has been going on for some time now. You already know the lengths to which the NFL will go to protect its quarterbacks. We’ve called some of these modifications Manning Rules or Brady Rules or whatever, but in truth the league wants none of its marquee players to ever get hurt, even though this is still tackle football, strictly speaking.

So get used to life without the swivel-hip-drop, assuming you knew you were living in a world in which it was a thing.

Oh! Almost forgot. The NFL’s own people agree that it’s going to be incredibly difficult to interpret and enforce this ban.

“This will be a hard one to call on the field,” says NFL Competition Committee chair Rich McKay. “You have to see every element of it. We want to make it a rule so that we can deal on the discipline during the week.”

In other words, guys will get warned and fined in the week after they did something wrong, which they possibly didn’t know they were doing wrong while they were doing it, thus committing an infraction the officials themselves may not even recognize as a legitimate foul.

Now go get ‘em.