We are officially in that dead period between free agency and the draft, when any possible news is at a premium. After the draft you get to hear all about new players, minicamps, training camp and next thing you know, the regular season is upon us. For now, we've heard everything about everybody and still can't hammer down who the 49ers will pick.
In the meantime? Well, the NFL begins it's annual meetings this week. MM was involved in a big conference call involving Rich McKay, the co-chair of the competition committee and Ray Anderson, the NFL Executive VP of Football Operations. They went through some of the rule proposals. These are proposals, meaning the teams would have to vote on them to make them new rules:
- Eliminating the force out rule and would be rewritten to only apply when a player is held and carried out of bounds: If I'm a DB in the redzone, I'm salivating at the chance of just pushing the wide receiver out of bounds, rather than having to defend the ball in the end zone.
- Expand instant replay to field goals that hit the cross-bar: Better than not having it I suppose.
- Allowing winner of opening coin toss to defer choice to second half: In Madden I always choose to kick off in the first half.
- Eliminate 5-yard face mask penalties: I'm not sure if this means they become 15 yarders like the more physical kinds, or they're going to allow more incidental face masks?
- Top 2 teams get bye, but remaining 4 seeds are by record w/divisional title being the tie-breaker: This would mean that a 9-7 division champion would be seeded lower than a 10-6 wild card team. I think a team should be rewarded for winning more games than another team
- New Hair Policy: While it's not quite as bad as people thought, it's still a little stupid. Basically, a player's hair would not be allowed to cover their name or number on the back of their jersey, or their numbers on the side of their jerseys. The NFL said that players don't have to cut their hair, they just need to keep it in their helmet. I look at this as a way for the league to get their way but not come off as Nazis. Thoughts?
Noticeably absent yet again, changing overtime rules. I'm curious what people think of the current overtime rules? Considering the frequency with which teams drive down and score on that opening drive of overtime, it just seems like there could be a better way to handle this. Changing to the college system would certainly be a drastic change. While I prefer it, there are still ways to handle overtime differently without too much change. I think each team should be guaranteed one possession. So the 49ers and Raiders are playing. The 49ers win the OT coin toss and score a touchdown. The 49ers would then kick off to the Raiders who would get the chance to score. If they don't score game over. If they do score, you do another coin toss and it then becomes sudden death. There are two things that would work in favor of this:
- If the Raiders lose the second coin toss and lose on a field goal, you can tell them they had their chance to stop the 49ers in the first part of OT.
- It will keep teams from playing for the safe field goal all the time because the other team will get a crack to possibly score a touchdown.