The Super Bowl is done. No more high-profile football games until late August.
You’ve read about how the NFL can become more like college football.
You’ve read about how college football should become more like the NFL.
What about the ways in which both versions of this sport can improve at the same time? Here are five shared solutions for both the NFL and the college game, flowing from five deficiencies the two provinces of pigskin have in common:
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5 – PLAY CHAMPIONSHIP GAMES ON A SATURDAY
The Super Bowl, if still played on Sunday, should really be followed by a federal holiday on Monday. Worker productivity takes a huge dive on the Monday after the Super Bowl. Our nation should be able to afford an extra day off, allowing workers who went full-tilt on Super Sunday to decompress. Besides, we’re all talking about commercials, halftime show wardrobes, and bad play calls in the offices, anyway. Super Bowl Monday should be a holiday.
As long as it’s not a holiday, though, the Super Bowl should be played on Saturday so that Sunday can be the decompression day. People can fly back to their residences on Sunday and be in working shape on Monday. This promotes holistic wellness for more Americans. Why should we not want that, ever?
Moreover, if the NFL is truly interested in becoming a more global sport with a more global brand, well, a Saturday start in the States would enable Europeans and Asians and Australians to watch the game:
https://twitter.com/dschaefer93/status/561945750272487424
The NFL, if it IS interested in expanding the global audience for its centerpiece product every year, would put the Super Bowl on Saturday. There can be no dispute on that particular point.
That aside, if Super Bowl Monday is not made a holiday, the Super Bowl should shift to Saturday, for the benefit of many.
College football? We’ve discussed here at The Student Section why the title game should be played on a Saturday.
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4 – CRACK DOWN ON FLOPPING PUNTERS
The need to protect punters is a vital one. Player safety ought to matter, especially in a sport as violent as football.
However, it is precisely because punters are so physically vulnerable that the notion of flopping to draw a penalty is so deeply offensive and, moreover, unfair to punt rushers. This should be a 30-yard penalty. Replay should be allowed to review punts regardless of whether they are tipped or not. To clarify, punts should be reviewed solely with respect to diving, if there is a question about the legitimacy of contact created by a punt rusher. Punters cannot be allowed to flop with impunity. Both sports need to get on this in the offseason.
3 – CLARIFY AND SIMPLIFY LEGAL CATCH RULES
This is the worst trend in football officiating over the past 15 years, ever since Jabar Gaffney’s catch in the 2000 Florida-Tennessee game.
Remember this play from Super Bowl XII in 1978? There simply wasn’t a furor surrounding the legitimacy of this catch by Butch Johnson of the Dallas Cowboys against the Denver Broncos:
The rules regarding legal catches should be simplified, with the threshold for legal possession defined downward such that it’s easier to secure a catch under the rules. No rational person thought Dez Bryant didn’t “catch” that pass against Green Bay in the divisional playoffs. No rational person thought a Boston College receiver didn’t “catch” a sideline pass late in the Pinstripe Bowl against Penn State. These plays were not “catches” according to bizarre sets of rules, but remember: If my two hands latch onto a ball, only to lose the ball at least a full second later, I never failed to “catch” the ball. I caught it and then fumbled it later.
Football’s rules — at both the pro and college levels — should reflect that reality. If I drop a ball a full second after my two hands clasped and secured the ball, I dropped the ball.
I did NOT drop the pass itself.
If you have one foot (college) or two feet (NFL) on the ground and your hands have firmly clasped the ball, that’s a catch. End of story.
The rules. Should. Reflect. That. Immediately.
2 – MAKE PASS INTERFERENCE AND OTHER PLAYS REVIEWABLE
This is the greatest failure of replay policies in both college football and the NFL. No penalty is more influential relative to the outcomes of games than pass interference, especially at the pro level, given the spot foul for a long-ball penalty. The TCU-Baylor game this past college football season was decided in part on a bogus defensive pass interference penalty against the Horned Frogs.
Look, I know people will say that you can’t attain clarity on many pass interference rulings — they’re so subjective in many cases.
Point conceded. I won’t argue this, because it’s an excellent point.
This provision — allowing pass interference (calls and non-calls alike) to be reviewed — should lead to another reform both sports should pursue: The two-minute limit on processing and adjudicating ALL REPLAY CALLS. If you can’t make a clear determination that there’s enough evidence to overturn a call within two minutes, the play stands.
Many people — it is safe to say — hate replay because it takes too darn long. If this flaw in the administration of replay could be corrected, you’d have a lot less anxiety and pushback on expanding replay, especially into the realm of pass interference.
Allowing pass interference to be reviewable would not be aimed at 50-50 calls, but at weeding out obviously blown calls — with or without flags as part of the initial on-field rulings. If two minutes could not clearly unearth evidence of a missed call, the initial ruling stands. It just doesn’t need to be this hard, folks.
1 – GET RID OF THE FUMBLE-OFF-THE-PYLON-IS-A-TOUCHBACK RULE AND ITS RELATED COMPONENTS
This is the worst rule in all team sports.
Why? It is a rule in which the punishment and the crime are wildly out of balance.
If you’re going to be punished with the severity of not only forfeiting possession at the expense of a likely touchdown, but giving the other team the ball at the 20 and not the 1, the defense needs to recover the football. That is a true “lost fumble.” If the defense wants to get the ball back, it should have to pounce on the ball, as opposed to receiving the extraordinary good fortune of seeing the ball nick that orange stick or that coat of white paint marking the side of the end zone.
Remember this, too: Bobbling a punt or kickoff out of your own end zone is NOT a safety. A player must fully possess the ball and then fumble it in the NFL for that to occur. In college ball, a player can fully possess a kickoff in the end zone, attempt to run out of the end zone, fumble, and STILL not surrender a safety. This happened in the 2011 Hawaii-San Jose State game, if you’re curious.
Plainly, fumbles out of one’s own end zone are not punished severely in football. Why are fumbles out of an opponent’s end zone punished so severely? From a strictly punitive standpoint, why should a fumble not recovered by the opposing team be a nothingburger at one spot on the field but a (frequently) game-deciding penalty at another?
This IS the worst rule in all team sports. It must die. Now. In both college football and the NFL.
