The standard for any rules change in the NFL is a 24–8 vote, and there’s a reason why it’s not a simple majority—it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, easy to rewrite the rule book. And, yet, here we are, and over a two-month period through which a grand total of zero games were played, the league moved from being split on the NFL’s proposed kickoff modification to strongly supporting it.
At the March owners meeting, commissioner Roger Goodell could barely get the room to 16–16 and the competition committee’s idea to allow for fair catches inside the 25-yard line to be counted as touchbacks, with the ball coming out to the 25. At the spring meetings May 22–23 in Eagan, Minn., after Goodell politicked for those two months—by show of hands—there were around 13 no votes on the floor, leaving the NFL, counting the Raiders’ abstention, well short of the 24 needed to pass the change.
“We’ll pick this up in the privileged session,” Goodell told the room, after it became clear he didn’t have the votes on the first day of the league’s spring meeting.
And in that owners-only privileged session, like magic, the proposal was voted through.
The final count was 26-5-1—the Ravens, Patriots, Bengals, Bears and Lions voted against it—which means that, in less than 24 hours, Goodell was able to flip eight teams. That’s a of the league swayed by the commissioner and his team of lieutenants (Rich McKay, Dawn Aponte, Jeff Miller and Dr. John York were among those selling) overnight.
Again, the idea here is that it’s supposed to be difficult to change rules.
We can go over why the NFL’s 32 special teams coaches and 34 special teams players, representing all 32 teams, got on calls two weeks ago and unanimously agreed that the new kickoff rule wouldn’t fix anything—and might in fact make the play more dangerous. We can show you why John Harbaugh, Sean Payton, Bill Belichick and Dan Campbell backed those coaches and players, and why the threat of litigation, used by Goodell and his team to wrangle votes for the proposal, shouldn’t be enough to swing the pendulum.
But we’ve explained all that already. To me, the overriding issue here is how it happened. How the NFL ignored the people who know the play that’s changing best, and understand the reaction that’ll come to the action (with squibs, knucklers, directional kicks, etc.). How this became about getting owners away from their coaches and players, and having the last word with them. How an NFL that’s planning for its stars to play more games this year on Thursday and on turf than ever before is using this to try to occupy the high ground on safety.
And, truthfully, the whole thing sucks.
