Here’s an interesting rule proposal that appears to be on the immediate horizon, and yet has no specific proposal in place to be discussed by the Competition Committee when they convene for one of their annual meetings next week: the league wants to make certain plays eligible for immediate ejection and suspension.
Apparently, the reason that this proposal isn’t currently on the table with all the other rules that I have discussed in the past couple of days is because it would understandably require a pretty heavy involvement with the NFL Players’ Association, since, you know, it would involve giving their partner in their labor agreement even greater power over suspending their members.
According to Rich McKay, the chairman of the Competition Committee, what the league is looking to curb is not “a widespread situation”, but rather a few isolated situations on a yearly basis that they are looking to see eliminated from the game.
“This is a situation where there are certain plays in our game that we want out of the game, and we just want to make sure the players are put on notice that if these actions happen, then they could be subject to suspension”, the president of the Falcons told reporters recently in discussing the proposal.
He said that the Competition Committee is working on assembling a video that will demonstrate several instances of the types of plays that the league is looking to eliminate from the game, a video that will presumably be passed around the league for all players and coaches to see to begin the education process and ‘put them on notice’, so to speak.
Vice president Troy Vincent described the plays on the video as “catastrophic” and said that enforcement of such plays is “going to be a real point of emphasis forthcoming”. No examples of such plays were given.
“I think sometimes people get caught up in the idea that a player should be warned and then there should be progressive enforcement”, McKay later said about the proposed policy. “In this case these are plays we just don’t want in our game and our feeling is if suspension is an option and you show those plays to players, we’ve seen them really conform to rule changes…So, that’s the purpose of that”.
It will be interesting to see what the union has to say about this once it reaches that point of the discussion. Obviously their representatives will not be jumping at the opportunity of expanding the league’s power and authority to suspend players, and yet it is being brandished as a player safety issue. Surely they will want some concession in exchange for the increased power.
