Tag: hip drop tackle

NFL bans hip-drop tackle 14 months after Tony Pollard injury

From @ToddBrock24f7: Cowboys fans know well the dangers of the hip-drop, but many believe it shouldn’t be officiated out of the game. The NFL will try in 2024.

The NFL’s owners have taken a step toward what they believe will be a safer game, but the decision is sure to cause uncertainty during play this season and has already caused an uproar among players and fans.

The so-called “hip-drop” tackle will be illegal starting in 2024, according to reports coming out of the league meetings in Orlando. The controversial technique was a talking point of major emphasis all of last season after several players suffered severe injuries as a result of its use on the field.

Cowboys running back Tony Pollard was the victim of a hip-drop tackle in the January 2023 playoff loss to San Francisco, carted off with a fractured fibula and high ankle sprain.

Owners unanimously voted Monday to ban the tackle beginning in 2024. For the purposes of officiating, a hip-drop tackle is defined as one in which a player “grabs the runner with both hands or wraps the runner with both arms” and then “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.”

The competiton committee reportedly showed owners a video montage of hip-drop tackles in which the Pollard play was featured prominently. The committee’s Rich McKay said that after reviewing film of 20,000 tackles, the hip-drop technique was shown to have resulted in an injury rate “20 times the others.”

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The NFLPA had already come out in opposition of the ban, calling it too difficult to enforce with any consistency. While the on-the-field penalty for the technique will be a loss of 15 yards and an automatic first down, it is believed that the league will largely attempt to enforce the new rule through monetary fines for guilty players after the fact.

Many players, coaches, analysts, and longtime football traditionalists have called the move to ban the hip-drop tackle a softening of the game, something many said about the horse-collar tackle technique that was similarly outlawed in 2005 after a rash of injuries during the 2004 season, when Cowboys safety Roy Williams used the move frequently.

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National reaction to NFL banning the hip drop tackle

We’re looking at the player and media reaction to the NFL banning the hip drop tackle at the NFL owners meetings

Defensive coaches around the league will have to do their job even more efficiently after the NFL formally voted to make the hip drop tackle illegal and a 15-yard penalty.

Here are the detailed rules for how it will be enforced.

The NFLPA has been a significant opponent of the rule, and defensive players around the league are starting to react.

NFL defenders will now have to run through the tackle or aim for an even lower target when approaching an offensive player in the open field.

With the move now official, here’s the reaction from players and media.

JJ Watt says NFL getting closer to flag football with recent rule change

Former Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt is among those who aren’t with the NFL’s “hip drop” tackle ban.

NFL approved a ban on “swivel hip drop” tackles Monday, which would penalize defensive players for pulling offensive players to the ground with their bodies. While these tackles have resulted in some serious injuries, a lot of NFL players aren’t happy with the decision by the league, its owners and the competition committee.

Former Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt was among those to denounce the ban. He posted a message on social media that the NFL is trending toward becoming a flag football league.

“Just fast forward to the belts with flags on them …” Watt wrote.

Other players like Texans’ defensive back Lonnie Johnson Jr. called the rule change “BS” while Miami Dolphins safety Jevon Hollard wrote, “Breaking news: Tackling Banned.”

The NFL Players Association also denounced the decision. The NFLPA wrote in a statement Monday that “we cannot support a rule change that causes confusion for us as players, for coaches, for officials and especially, for fans” and asked the league to reconsider its stance on the rule change.

 

There were 230 tackles like the ones the league will ban, according to NFL executive vice president Jeff Miller. He added that 15 players missed time because of the tackle.

The biggest injury to come out of one of these tackles was to Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews. He suffered serious ankle injury that required surgery and forced Andrews to miss the next seven games before he could return in the AFC championship match. Andrews played just 18 snaps in that game.

 

Here is the full rule, per NFL.com:

It is a foul if a player uses the following technique to bring a runner to the ground:

(a) grabs the runner with both hands or wraps the runner with both arms; and

(b) 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.

Penalty: For a Hip-Drop Tackle: Loss of 15 yards and an automatic first down.
Competition committee chairman Rich McKay disagreed with the idea that this new rule would have unintended consequences, such as making tackling harder for players.

“Because this isn’t the elimination of hip-drop, this is an elimination of a swivel technique that doesn’t get used very often. When it is used, it is incredibly injurious to the runner — the runner is purely defenseless,” McKay said. “I’ve heard defenders say before and I hear them — ‘Hey, you’re putting me in a really tough spot, you’re saying I can’t hit here and what do I do?’ My response has as always been, ‘Well, you can’t do that.’ That’s just because the guy you’re hitting is defenseless, has no way to protect himself. So, we’ve got to protect him.

“You’ve got to come up with other ways and you know what, they do. Yes, we outlawed the hip-drop, but what you may think are the drag-from-behind where he falls on the – that’s still a tackle. This is only that tackle where the player is lifting themselves in the air and then falling on the legs.”

McKay also acknowledged that it could be tough for referees to officiate in the first year.

“This will be a hard one to call on the field, you have to see every element of it,” he said. “We want to make it a rule so we can deal on the discipline during the week.”

NFLPA opposes NFL’s proposed ban on hip-drop tackle

“The players oppose any attempt by the NFL to implement a rule prohibiting a ‘swivel hip-drop’ tackle,” the NFLPA said in a statement.

The NFL has proposed a ban on the so-called “hip-drop tackle” that the league says increases the likelihood of injury during a play.

In their new rule proposals for the 2024 season, the NFL has suggested a 15-yard penalty if a player “grabs the runner with both hands or wraps the runner with both arms; and 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.”

The NFL Players Association made it known in a statement Wednesday that they are opposed to the potential new rule.

“The players oppose any attempt by the NFL to implement a rule prohibiting a ‘swivel hip-drop’ tackle,” the NFLPA wrote on its Twitter/X page. “While the NFLPA remains committed to improvements to our game with health and safety in mind, we cannot support a rule change that causes confusion for us as players, for coaches, for officials, and especially, for fans. We call on the NFL, again, to reconsider implementing this rule.”

Former Denver Broncos defensive lineman Shelby Harris also spoke out about the proposed rule:

NFL owners will vote on the league’s new rule proposals next week.

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Ravens TE Mark Andrews injured on hip-drop tackle, which the NFL has considered banning

Ravens TE Mark Andrews was injured against the Bengals on a hip-drop tackle, which the NFL talked about banning this year.

Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews has been Lamar Jackson’s favorite target for a number of years, but Jackson lost his best guy early in Baltimore’s Thursday night game against the Cincinnati Bengals.

With 11:05 left in the first quarter, Andrews caught a pass from Jackson, and was tackled at the Cincinnati four-yard line by linebacker Logan Wilson. The method used was the hip-drop tackle, which has been on the NFL’s mind for a while now.

Andrews was subsequently ruled out of the game after going to the locker room for X-rays.

At the mid-October league meetings, league executive Jeff Miller said that the league was thinking of banning the hip-drop tackle — in part because studies have shown a 25% increase in injuries.

“It is an unforgiving behavior and one that we need to try to define and get out of the game,” Miller said, via the Associated Press. “To quantify it for you, we see an injury more or less every week in the regular season on the hip-drop.”

Competition Committee chairman Rich McKay said that the hip drop is a close cousin of the horse-collar tackle, which was banned by the league years ago.

“What’s happening on the hip-drop is the defender is encircling tackling the runner and then swinging their weight and falling on the side of their leg, which is their ankle or their knee,” McKay said.

“When they use that tactic, you can see why they do, because it can be a smaller man against a bigger man and they’re trying to get that person down because that’s the object of the game. But when they do it, the runner becomes defenseless. They can’t kick their way out from under. And that’s the problem. That’s where the injury occurs. You see the ankle get trapped underneath the weight of the defender.”

In the end, as McKay said, the decision was made to see how things went in the 2023 season before making any more moves against the tactic.

“Last year, we did talk about it a lot. There were enough teams to say it’s one year, let’s see it and leave it alone. So we did, and I’m sure it’ll be back again. But I just don’t want to get in the business of predicting because I really don’t know what the outcome will be. I do know it will be talked about.”

It will certainly be talked about now.