Tag: 2024 season Week 14

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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Cowboys open roof for ‘Monday Night Football’… without incident this time

From @ToddBrock24f7: Three weeks after a piece of metal crashed to the playing surface hours before a game, the Cowboys have opened their roof for Week 14.

With a two-game win streak under the Cowboys’ belt, the sky is no longer falling in Dallas.

And now as the team gears up for a Week 14 primetime bout with the Bengals, neither is the roof over their heads.

The retractable roof at AT&T Stadium has been opened for the Monday night matchup, just three weeks after a large piece of sheet metal crashed to the playing surface hours before the team’s Nov. 18 game against the Texans.

No one was hurt in that incident, and the roof was closed in plenty of time for the evening’s game, which Dallas lost by a 34-10 score. The piece of metal turned out to be a covering lid to a cable tray located within the inner workings of the roof. High winds in the area that day had loosened the lid, and a heavy gust sent it flying only a couple hours prior to kickoff.

Crews later determined that there were no structural issues with the stadium. The venue stayed open and then hosted another game Thanksgiving Day, although the roof remained closed.

The Monday forecast in Arlington called for temperatures around 56 degrees at kickoff after a sunny and wday in the area.

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The roof at the 15-year-old stadium has been open for less than 25% of all Cowboys home games since its grand opening. Monday night will mark the first time it’s been left open for a Cowboys game since Oct. 30, 2022.

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