that regulation changes need initiative: A bigger NFL problem, and Taylor Decker
In the playoffs’ Wild Card round, the Buffalo Bills beat the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday. The final score of Bills 31, Steelers 17 indicates how dominant the Bills were throughout the whole game.
I know you’re wondering why I’m talking about this game. Why discuss two clubs that aren’t the Jets on a Jets website? Well, since there was an unjust incident in that game that may have affected the Jets or any other NFL club. The Steelers were the victims in this instance.
Josh Allen, the quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, rushes for the first down on the first play before coming to a near complete halt. When a quarterback does this, 99 times out of 100, they are handing away the ball with a slide. Defenders should essentially give up on hitting the quarterback at this point since doing so will result in a 15-yard penalty if the quarterback slides. That is exactly what happens in the first clip, when the defenders seem to give up on Allen. But Allen doesn’t falter. Rather, he goes another 40 yards and scores a touchdown, giving the Bills a 21-0 lead. A 21-0 deficit is quite difficult to overcome, and the Steelers were never able to.
The second footage shows Allen running again later in the game. This time he slips, and the defender follows after him, maybe picking up on the play that his team did before that resulted in a big play score. With his momentum bringing him into Allen, he is struck on the slide and the Bills gain an additional 15 yards for the personal foul.
The combination of the two plays creates an ideal example of a play that the NFL should mandate. If the NFL isn’t going to train defenders to read minds like Jean Grey from the X-Men, how are they meant to determine with accuracy if a player is going to slide and decide whether to tackle or not?
Why, therefore, am I discussing this game on a Jets website? Because this game is a great opportunity to discuss the fake slide and why an NFL team should do it. It is impossible to write off the discussion of these plays as an emotional outburst since they were not the deciding factor in the game. However, this will ultimately determine a game (and I’ve been trained as a Jets supporter to anticipate it to be against the Jets at a pivotal moment). When does it happen, then? It’s going to be loud and ugly, friend, no matter whose team it goes against.
We need only go at a comparable case between the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys a few weeks ago to see the type of fury that results from delaying the enactment of a rule for too long.
The Lions thought they had thrown the game-winning touchdown on this play. The problem? It was the officials’ mistake to throw a flag that disallowed the convert because they believed there had been another lineman designated eligible. Why does this matter? Because, as Darin Gaant of ProFootballTalk notes, the Baltimore Ravens had already proposed a rule intended to stop this exact situation from occurring back in 2016.
The Ravens are either sick of losing games due to ineligible receiver penalties or Steve Bisciotti, the team owner, has stock in a firm that makes pinnie.
One of Baltimore’s submissions to the owners conference next week to clarify the eligible receiver rule is among the sillier suggested rule modifications.
A player (numbers 50–79 and 90–99) who enters the game as an eligible receiver but is later declared ineligible must “wear a jersey vest matching the team uniform, with an appropriate number for his eligible or ineligible status that has not already been assigned to another teammate,” according to the Ravens proposal.
Even while this rule was not enacted, looking back, it would have been proactive to make this little rule modification, which would have avoided years later mistakenly calling the Lions play. I doubt that the rule would be characterised as “goofy,” as Gaant said at the time, if it were offered again this offseason after the Lions play attracted national media attention. This is because the regulation’s primary goal was to solve an underlying problem.
I believe that regulations should be more aggressive in general, much as the Ravens attempted to do with the ineligible receiver. In the case of the Josh Allen fake slide, it didn’t appear to have much of an impact on a game that the Bills were probably going to win otherwise. But who’s to say that in future years a play like this doesn’t determine a Super Bowl or a championship game? And what if a play like that prevented the Jets from making the playoffs—a pertinent one considering that the Jets face the Bills twice a year as in-division opponents—? Are they the kinds of results that anybody really wants to be possible? One where the defender has to remark, “I thought he was going to slide,” while standing on a platform after a play that loses his team the game. Accepting the penalty is my second choice, but it didn’t help either.
In summary, the phoney slide hasn’t caused much trouble so far, but in a copycat league, it may do so very soon. I believe this is one of the problems the NFL has to do better at identifying before they get out of hand, as was the case with Detroit’s ineligible receiver. As a fan, all I can hope for is that the NFL, instead of waiting for the outcry to start, takes the Detroit lesson to heart and stops plays that are legal but not in line with the rules.
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