Few groups have a more understated impact on the NFL than the competition committee. Every season it brings new rules to football that affect the game for years to come. Who could forget Bill Polian, Colts GM and a long-time member of the committee, instituting a crackdown on illegal contact after the Patriots bullied his receivers in the 2003 AFC Championship? Six years later, quarterbacks are putting up record-high numbers league-wide.
The committee made its annual proposals yesterday, which the owners will vote on next week. It's in favor of expanding instant replay (I'm all for it) and cracking down on illegal hits (looong overdue). Unfortunately, the committee won't propose a "Calvin Johnson" rule to clarify the definition of a catch, since apparently we need to challenge the referees with as much gray area as possible.
The proposal that will be most noticeable this fall is the movement of kickoffs and touchbacks up to the 35 and 25 yard line, respectively. The league's goal is to decrease the amount of high-speed kickoff returns in the name of player safety (while the owners still negotiate for two more games, of course). For the first time in a long time, we'll have a rule that favors the defense.
This change would reverse past rulings in the mid-1990s that pushed the kickoff back to the 30 and instituted the "K ball" to promote more kickoff returns. As touchbacks once again become common, teams will ditch their kickoff specialist and put less thought into their kick returners. Former GM Pat Kirwan wrote yesterday that some special teams coaches will try to pin opponents inside their 20 with a high kick, much like a coffin corner punt. Kirwan also suggested on NFL radio yesterday that kickoffs might one day be taken out of the game completely. I don't think we'll ever reach that point, but its clear that images like the one below will be few and far between.
Image found here.
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