By AILEEN BURKE
Contributing Writer
The National Football League is already four weeks into the new football season, and the calls are as crucial as ever. Any game can be decided on the gridiron with one faulty call.
Roughing the Passer is the most popular penalty so far this season; the league seems to be relentlessly attentive with making sure the Quarterbacks are protected. Overly protected, if you ask players like the Green Bay Packers’ Clay Matthews, whose Roughing the Passer penalty was a major detriment in the Packers’ second week game against the Minnesota Vikings after it overturned a Packers’ interception. That game ultimately ended in a 29-29 tie. The new version of the age-old call is causing problems that are frustrating NFL organizations and their fans alike.
“Unfortunately, this league is going in a direction that a lot of people don’t like. I think they’re getting soft. The only thing hard about this league is the fines they levy down on guys like me that play the game hard. Maybe now pass rushers, guys getting after the quarterback, you’ll just have to attack the ball,” said Matthews to CBS News.
An interesting angle on the issues surrounding this call comes from a quarterback, someone severely influenced by Roughing the Passer both before and after the change of ruling. 2011 Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers agrees with his teammate Matthews’ comments, although the frequent use of the call in question would only be to his benefit. Rodgers suffered a broken clavicle in an October 2017 hit by linebacker Anthony Barr of the Minnesota Vikings; this is why the new version of the rule is casually referred to as the ‘Aaron Rodgers Rule’ by those in the industry. Other quarterbacks who have been impacted quite literally due to debatable calls of the same nature this season are the Vikings’ Kirk Cousins and the Redskins’ Alex Smith.
In the past, calls on Roughing have been harder to achieve. The 2018 rule change stipulates that a player cannot land on the quarterback with their whole body weight. The wording leaves incredible room for interpretation by the referees, and it is becoming harder for players to sack or tackle without consideration of the call.
Players are having trouble choosing how to approach tackling, and now have added weight put on them because of the frequency of the calls. No one wants to put their team at a disadvantage, especially when a game is on the line. Strict interpretation of this new rule could quite easily cost a team their game.
Fans are just as bamboozled as the players with the new version of the call; they have taken to Twitter in droves to show and discuss video evidence of particularly inconsistent calls against Matthews, but the NFL and their commissioner, Roger Goodell, remain silent. After a month of play, it looks as though it is going to be a long season for anyone playing a defensive position. No matter what, it will be interesting to see how these calls evolve – or stay the same – as the season progresses.
