Cowboys: Will new NFL rules kill short-yardage conversions?

The NFL is busy overhauling the rulebook to improve both quality and safety of the game. Will these new rules hurt teams like the Cowboys who rely on short-yardage situations?

The Dallas Cowboys aren’t the only ones having a busy week, the NFL as a whole is busy making fundamental changes to the game we all know and love. With viewership and youth participation trending in the wrong direction, the NFL is wasting no time trying to get ahead of the troubling situation.

clearer rules and ever-progressing safety concerns are the top priority this offseason, and for better or for worse, the NFL is acting quickly to address them.

After unanimously agreeing to overhaul and simplify what constitutes a reception in the NFL, new rules were rolled out with safety in mind:

Playing Rule Article 8: It is a foul if a player lowers his head to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent. The player may be disqualified. Applies to any player anywhere on the field. The player may be disqualified.
— Brian McCarthy (@NFLprguy) March 27, 2018

This release has already caused panic across Twitter over the last few hours. The verbiage used clearly states this applies to everywhere on the field. It applies in the open field and in short yardage situations between the tackles. It’s everywhere and for everyone.

The NFL isn’t trying to take away all lowering of the head. They are trying to take away anything that appears to the weaponization of ones helmet.

After first reading it I thought it had the potential to make goal line dive plays an endangered species.

Because how else could you squeeze through a six inch crease in heavy traffic than to lower your head and slice your way through?

Even more troubling – converting in these situations is what the Cowboys team is built on. If running between the tackles gets harder to do legally, what good is a power running game?

Anyone who’s played, or frankly even watched a game, knows lowering the head is an inevitable action in this game of leverage and angles. To prevent players from doing so would take away more than just injury potential – it would take away much of what the game is.

Subjectivity and interpretation

But much like the new and improved catch rule, the NFL has given themselves a little subjective interpretation on the matter.

The key phrasing is “…to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent…”

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The NFL isn’t trying to take away all lowering of the head. They are trying to take away anything that appears to the weaponization of ones helmet. As such, a running back can still charge dome-first through a tiny window in short-yardage situations, as long as that tiny window is his target and not another player.

It’s about action, intent, and execution.

And this is where the subjectivity and interpretation could get dangerous. This is a fast moving game and players act instinctively. Depending how it’s enforced, we could see some costly ejections early on.

As we’ve seen in NFL secondaries over the past few years, old habits are hard to break. Players struggled with the “defenseless receiver” thing quite a bit when first rolled out. But eventually things changed. Nowadays we may not have eliminated all contact between defensive backs and defenseless receivers, but we’ve come a long way.

I expect the same to happen with this new rule.

It’s easy to get up in arms over new safety rules that soften the level of contact in the world’s most contact-rich sport, but for the sake of survival (both to players and to the business entity that is the NFL), it needs to happen.

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We’ll see how this all plays out. Will the referees ease the league into it or will it be a shocking and inflexible roll-out? We don’t really know. But the verbiage allows subjectively and discretion in its application so let’s not get too upset before we see it in action.

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