Flag Football
This is ridiculous.
I hated Illegal Contact before this season. Always thought it was a lame penalty, but it didn’t get called that often. Now it’s the worst, just the worst. I realize the Seahawks found a way to exploit the system, but maybe they should try to look at why the system sucked in the first place instead of just ramping up calls of stupid stupid penalties. The NFL has said they are going to keep calling these during the regular season. I honestly think that’s a bluff, because if it’s like this during the regular season the fans are going to be furious. Defenses are already so hampered by bullshit rules meant to keep offenses from being disrupted (some are good rules for safety, others like this and PI are just bad). Not to mention the dumbest fact of all: illegal contact is a 5 yard penalty, and an automatic first down. If the Offense is at 2nd and 9, and get an illegal contact, it’s 1st and ten. THAT IS SO DUMB. DUMB. DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB. You are dumb, NFL. you eat dumb for breakfast and you poop dumb into your dumb toilets and it goes into your dumb face when you dunk your own dumb head into your dumb toilets because you are dumb. It should be 5 yards, repeat down. 2nd and 9 becomes 2nd and 4. That still punishes the defense a fair amount (anything under 5 yards to go would still be an autofirst) but won’t completely shatter a defense. If they keep the current rule all year, and keep calling this penalty, we are going to have horribly paced games and record levels of scoring. It’s going to be garbage. It already is.
You dummys.
Oh and while your at it NFL why don’t you be practical and make defensive PI 15 yards like college does. That’s way better. Still a severe penalty, but not nearly as punishing a result when a ref makes a poor judgement call (which happens all the time with PI).
That may be my favorite Sexy Rexy Yet.
And yes, the penalty is just too damn much for the crime.
PI as a 15 yard is a terrible idea– but it should totally be reviewable with the possibility of not only reverse of the call, but pushing it the other way. Illegal Contact should definitely not be auto-first. I know their justification– “If the defense hadn’t played illegally, the offense could have made the first down easier”. I hate that justification. They get a free down– if they could do it, they’ll get the chance the next play. But PI as 15 yards, man. You eliminate any route over 20 yards. College is slower, weaker, and frankly less cut-throat (at least on the field) than the NFL. They’ll take that 15 yard penalty every time they’re even a little bit beat.
But yeah, I don’t know *anyone* who likes the auto-first on Illegal contact. 3rd and 23 to 1st and 10 on a bump 6 yards out that was away from the play? Screw that noise.
Oh god no! Don’t make PI reviewable. They’re doing that in the CFL this year and it is horrible. It almost never gets overturned and slows the game down to like NFL levels of slow. It’d be even worse in the NFL.
Also, Dave, it’s not the Seahawks’ fault that Manning sucks and will have less Lombardis than his brother. Don’t listen to Pereira and his delusional fantasies.
I can see the 15 yard penalty argument, but yeah, making PI reviewable is the worst. That would slow the game down to a crawl.
It is the Seahawks fault. The rest of the teams got together in the offseason and made a fuss about their constant contact strategy (They won’t call us on every play so lets do it constantly). I liked what the Seahawks were doing, but the rest of the NFL threw a hissy fit and now that’s why this is happening. It won’t hurt the Hawks much, Sherman and Co are good enough to find other ways to win, it’s going to hurt the lesser defensive teams who need that leniency to survive.
Coaches still only have the 2-3 challenges per game, and you’re only talking called PI penalties. They are one of the least common penalties in the NFL, but they have an impact as big as any successful play. They’re incredibly hard to review accurately real time, especially on deep-balls, because refs aren’t able to keep up with players and tend to have the most distorted view of the play in any spot on the field. It’s a necessary penalty, but it needs to be treated like any completed play: reviewable, but not automatically reviewed.
I think that the whole PI thing should be separated into incidental and deliberate, like facemask. Incidental is 5 yards, deliberate is 15 if on offense, 10 and autofirst if on defense.
*spot of foul and autofirst on offense
The Incidental facemask hasn’t been a penalty for two or three seasons now. It’s all fifteen yards regardless of intent.
The NFL doesn’t want a fair game or even a safe game, they want a game that is “exciting” which to the brain dead idiots running this league means “MORE TOUCHDOWNS = more excitement = more money!!”.
The integrity of the game has GOT to stand for something. I know they want to sell seats at the stadiums and sell jerseys but this NOT how you do it.
15-yard PI is terrible; it penalizes the offense for beating the defense deep.
It should be the lesser of the spot of the foul, or half-the-distance to the goal. This stops the ball from being spotted on the 1 for a ticky-tack PI in the end zone, but still gives the offense the benefit of the deep ball.
Yeah but half the PIs called on defenses are bullshit ticky tack calls, because it’s such a judgement play. It comes down to what you’re willing to sacrifice I guess. a 15 yard auto first down still significantly punishes the defense, but then we don’t have a case where a 40 yard penalty happens because the two players crossed feet and fell over and the ref called it as PI. I see the argument you’re making, that offenses can chuck it deep and the DB can just interfere when he know’s he’s beat. Considering it’s already kind of a valid strategy to take a deep shot and see if you can get a PI call, I don’t know if an auto 15 is any worse.
Maybe if the PI is obviously malicious they can keep it at the spot.
you’re*
This.
This comic hits in on the nose.
You know, one thing that I find really funny about this, is that though everyone blames the Seahawks for this, they’ve only been called for about 3 or 4 illegal contact penalties so far this season, and only one or two have been on the first team. In addition to that, the Seahawks weren’t called for illegal contact once last year. I understand the narrative that the refs wouldn’t want to call it every play, but to never call it even once? That makes no sense at all.
They’re not being called because Carroll is smart enough to adjust. Look at the tape of the Superbowl, the Seahawks are doing what would be a flag this year all over the place.
At the rules conference, or whatever it’s called, the league decided to emphasize what was happening. It was still a rule, but wasn’t being enforced as heavily. I’ve seen what the Seahawks did in the Super Bowl several times, watched the secondary on the all-22 that comes with game rewind, and I did see a few plays where that could have been called, but the narrative that it should be called all the time, or even just “all over the place”, is really kinda bunk.
Plus, what you’re saying doesn’t cover the fact that it was NEVER called against the Seahawks last year, regular season or playoffs. Even if the rule wasn’t enforced that strongly, there still should have been something, anything, to indicate that that specific rule was being broken.
Part of me wants to go tinfoil hat on this and say it’s a conspiracy to get Captain Forehead a ring by making his short pass style offense unstoppable.
Here’s hoping everyone saying it’ll be better in the regular season is right.
*passes over a tin foil hat*
I’ve got too good at making these…
Actually PI is reviewable in the CfL for those who don’t know Canadian football league and it’s reviewed maybe once a game at the most sometimes 2-3 but the pace hasn’t changed all that much
It’s all Peyton Manning’s fault. Every time he loses a Super Bowl, they change the rules to help him out
The best logic I’ve come up with on this is that illegal contact makes PI somewhat unnecessary, because everything that would have been PI is illegal contact now anyway, and IC, unlike PI, is a purely objective and easy to make call. Of course, one of the beauties of PI was that you had the opportunity to make non-calls and apply some common sense or rationalization to the problem.
Of course, as it is with bureaucracies, so it is with rule-enforcing apparati: if you give people options to make decisions, there is always a chance they will make embarassingly wrong choices. Give them a checklist of black/white rules and they’ll get it right everytime (cf the TSA).
Well, it’s called the No Fun League for a reason.
And BTW, 15 yards for defensive PI is okay, but reviewing PI would have games going slower than a blind snail.
Still relevant 🙁