The NFL season kicks off in less than a month, and the league's new helmet rule is still unclear, confusing and difficult to grasp. On Wednesday, the league once again tried to bring clarity to the rule by releasing yet another video breakdown of the rule, but the video had the opposite effect. The video, released by the NFL's head of officiating, Al Riveron, provides three examples of clean plays and three examples of penalties under the new rule. The clean plays are easy to understand in that none of the players involved are lowering their helmets to initiate contact. The penalties, however, are not easy to understand, because they're difficult to spot without the aid of commentary and/or indicators like arrows or bubbles or anything really (the league's last video breakdown, released in June, did at least include these things, and it was much more effective at clarifying the rule). Take a look: On the second-to-last play, the infraction might be on No. 82 of the Browns, who blocks his man with his helmet leading. On the final play, No. 92 of the Jaguars appears to engage his blocker with his helmet leading. Those are my best guesses. Either way, it took me four or five re-watches to find the penalties. Now, imagine an official being forced to spot those infractions in real time. Hell, the NFL just told me there was going to be an infraction before the plays started, and I still couldn't spot all of them until I replayed the video a few times. The rule, passed in March, aims to prevent players from lowering their heads to initiate and make contact with opponents. To be ejected, a player must lower "his helmet to establish a linear body posture prior to initiating and making contact with the the helmet," a player needs to have "an unobstructed path to his opponent," and the contact has to be "clearly avoidable." It's easy to understand why the league wanted to pass the rule. Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier suffered a tragic spinal injury when he lowered his head to make a routine tackle. Packers receiver Davante Adams was concussed when he got headshotted by Bears linebacker Danny Trevathan. Player safety matters. It should matter. But players aren't happy about the rule. Discussing the rule with officials hasn't made them any happier. And it's becoming clear that enforcing the rule might be a mess, because it's a very difficult rule to enforce in real time. The rule's intentions might be good, but enforcing the rule will likely be a mess.<doc-sep>AP The new helmet rules continue to be applied as written. Which will continue to make football something other than football. In Saturday night’s game between the Chargers and Cardinals, a pair of fouls were called on Arizona players. One, a penalty called on safety A.J. Howard, wiped out a fumble that the Cardinals had recovered. It was called an illegal hit on a defenseless receiver, but Chargers tight end Sean Culkin surely had the ball long enough to no longer be defenseless (indeed, he had the ball long enough to complete the process of making the catch). The far more likely reality is that Howard was flagged for lowering his helmet to initiate contact, which is precisely what he did. But here’s the problem: What else could he have done? Watch the video; Howard tries to execute a form tackle in real time and at full speed. But he misses the mark and his helmet hits Culkin. As the rule is written, it should be a penalty every time. It happened again, in the same game. Cardinals safety Travell Dixon, while apparently attempting to execute a form tackle, lowered his helmet and made contact with Chargers receiver Geremy Davis. The flag was thrown. Again, as the rule is written, it’s a foul. Yes, referee Brad Allen has said that more of these fouls will be called during the preseason. But the rule says what it says, and the rule is being applied properly. The problem is that the non-football players who crafted the 21-word rule made it so broad that it will attempt to correct behavior that is, as a practical matter, uncorrectable within the confines of the way the game has been played, for decades. Coaches should be concerned. Owners should be concerned. Executives should be concerned. The Commissioner should be concerned. Someone hijacked the game in March by downplaying to the membership what this rule would do to the game, comparing it to the rule that prohibits the ramming of the top of the helmet into an opponent outside the tackle box. Players quickly stopped using that technique, because it was a specific, defined maneuver that was easily spotted, easily called, and easily abandoned. This new rule is far broader, encompassing not only the intentional use of the helmet as a weapon but all inadvertent contact that occurs when one player who is moving collides with another player who is moving. And the smart thing to do would be to re-write the rule in a more narrow and precise way, to convene an emergency meeting of the owners (by phone if need be), and to ram through the revised rule the same way the first version of the rule was rammed through the league meetings in March. Recent history suggests that the NFL would never be willing to admit its blunder and to take proper action, opting instead to keep its head down, to deny the existence of a serious problem, and to suggest that anyone who sees this rule as something that could make the game unwatchable and arbitrary is overreacting. (That “anyone” could soon be “everyone.”) So get ready for a season that will quite possibly carry an asterisk for all the wrong reasons. It quite possibly will be the season in which ambiguity, happenstance, and random discretion ultimately have a significant role in who makes it to the playoffs and, ultimately, who wins the Super Bowl.<doc-sep>Keanu Neal is, objectively, extremely fun to watch. He hits like a truck with revenge on its mind, he runs like a deer, and he is always around the ball, which means he’ll deliver a couple of highlight-reel tackles per game. That style means he’s also at risk of being penalized under the NFL’s new, poorly-enforced helmet rule, and we saw that happen against the Chiefs. You’ll see Neal arrive a split second after Brooks Reed made contact and lead with his shoulder here. If you were watching this from an extreme distance, you might assume he had led with his helmet and deserved a 15 yard penalty. From basically any other angle or distance or speed, however, you’d realize this didn’t fit the bill. keanu neal got 15 yards for this pic.twitter.com/uKzodtxUw1 — charles mcdonald (lakers 0-0) (@FourVerts) August 17, 2018 That’s sort of the problem: The way Neal tackles, or at least appears to tackle, puts him at risk if the NFL doesn’t get better and more consistent at calling these kinds of penalties. My hope is that that they will, but every team in the NFL has to be nervous about enforcement, and not all those teams have Neal. What should Keanu do about it? In my humble opinion, not much. Changing his style or introducing hesitation would just take away from what makes him effective in the first place, and it’s really incumbent on the NFL to try to make the game safer without slowing it down and creating significant headaches. But I can also promise you, unfortunately, that this isn’t the last time Keanu Neal will be called for this exact penalty, whether or not he actually leads with his helmet.<doc-sep>
The latest helmet-rule penalty in the 2018 NFL preseason to garner overwhelming criticism came Thursday night in the second half of the Patriots' 37-20 win over the Eagles. New England's Jordan Richards was flagged for a questionable hit on Philadelphia's Dallas Goedert. Yes, Richards did lower his head to the point of what could be considered dangerous posture. The helmet may or may not have made contact with the ball-carrier before the shoulder, which therefore could be defined as "initiating contact" after lowering the head. But compared to other violations of the new rule seen this preseason, Richards' hit was benign. I’m not a big overreact guy but this being a penalty is bad bad news pic.twitter.com/AMu4UKrdSD — Digs (@Digz) August 17, 2018 This is where the NFL needs more transparency. DeCOURCY: Why we should stop complaining about NFL helmet rule We know NFL officials are intentionally flag-happy during preseason games in their attempt to establish consistency in their interpretation of the rules in time for the regular season. They're informed to "let it fly" in the preseason if they see a potential penalty, even if they're not sure. There's a chance NFL senior VP of officiating Al Riveron will tell those officials that, no, Richards' hit would not be a foul in the regular season. But even in the installment period that is the preseason, NFL fans and media are rightfully questioning the interpretation that, according to Riveron and a handful of referees at the officiating clinic in Dallas last month, should be manageable. The NFL's attempt to further explain its new use of helmet rule earlier this week was a swing and a miss. Riveron's Twitter account posted a video that included six plays — three proper-form hits and three violations of the rule — but the video was presented without verbal or visual explanation. A second, "updated" video with proper graphical explanation was tweeted later in the day. The same way the NFL released videos of Riveron explaining catch-rule calls during the 2017 season, real-time explanations for helmet-rule violations during the 2018 preseason would be helpful. The penalty on Richards, unlike the obvious violations the league has used in its videos, is a good example of a supposed violation of the helmet rule that requires prompt explanation. And it's OK if that explanation is something along the lines of, "Actually, this would not be called in a real game." If the call is determined to be good, coaches, players, fans and media alike deserve to know exactly how strictly the rule will be interpreted when the results of the games matter. Again, we know NFL officials are working out the kinks. We can handle admission of bad calls in the preseason. In the regular season? Not so much.