Cowboys safety fined for Week 14 hip-drop tackle vs Bengals

From @ToddBrock24f7: Donovan Wilson used the illegal technique during the 4th-quarter of Monday’s game. The tackle did not draw a penalty at the time.

The NFL has been seeking to take the so-called “hip-drop tackle” out of the sport. Now they’re taking a big chunk of change out of Donovan Wilson’s pocket for deploying it last week.

The league has fined the Cowboys safety $16,883 for his fourth-quarter tackle of Bengals tight end Tanner Hudson during the 27-20 loss Monday night.

The play did not incur a penalty during the game, but league officials have determined that Wilson’s actions met the requirements to be classified as a hip-drop tackle. The move falls under the category of unnecessary roughness and is therefore subject to a fine, even without being flagged on the field.

According to a rule change for the 2024 season, a hip-drop tackle can be called if a player grabs or wraps the runner with both hands or arms and also “unweights himself by swiveling and dropping his hips and/or lower body, landing on and trapping the runner’s leg(s) at or below the knee.”

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The move has caused severe injury to several high-profile players in recent years, including running back Tony Pollard while playing for the Cowboys during the 2022 postseason. San Francisco safety Jimmie Ward used the hip-drop technique to bring Pollard to the ground; Pollard suffered a high ankle sprain and fractured fibula.

Fourteen months after that injury, NFL owners unanimously voted to make it illegal, following a film review of 20,000 tackles that calculated the hip-drop technique resulting in an injury rate “20 times the others.”

Though the hip-drop is punishable on the field with a 15-yard walkoff and an automatic first down, it’s resulted in more monetary fines after the fact than penalties on the field during its first year of enforcement.

Wilson is the first Cowboys player to be fined for a hip-drop tackle. He was previously docked $11,255 for a Week 5 late hit in the team’s win over Pittsburgh.

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