NEW YORK – NFL officials will participate in two days of player-safety meetings beginning Tuesday in which the topics will include the new helmet-hitting rule and kickoffs.
The meetings are to take place at the NFL’s Manhattan offices. Troy Vincent, the league’s executive vice president of football operations, wrote Monday on Twitter that the participants will include owners, coaches, officials, former players and representatives of the NFL Players Association.
The sessions come as the league continues to work through the particulars of how the new hitting rule will be applied and enforced. At the annual league meeting in March, owners ratified the rule, which makes it a 15-yard penalty for a player to lower his head and use his helmet to deliver a hit to an opponent during a game.
The NFL said the new rule is not a targeting rule but is broader than that, focused not on a player targeting an opponent’s head with a hit but on attempting to eliminate a hitting technique that is dangerous to both the player receiving the hit and the player delivering it. League officials hailed it as a significant safety development and said they are trying to stop players from using their helmets as on-field weapons.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and others said in March they expect instant replay reviews to be used to help determine whether a player should be ejected from a game under the new rule. That is not officially part of the rule yet, and it represents a departure from the long-held view by the rulemaking NFL competition committee that replay should not be used to scrutinize judgment calls by the on-field officials.
The details of the rule are to be finalized when the owners meet in three weeks in Atlanta. Many players have reacted negatively to the rule, with some saying they don’t see how it can be enforced as written without changing the sport practically beyond recognition.
On kickoffs, the participants in this meeting are to explore possible measures to make the play safer. League leaders repeatedly have said they consider the kickoff the most dangerous play in the sport and they would consider eliminating it if they cannot make it safer for players. Some measures taken in recent years, such as having the football placed at the 25-yard line on a touchback on a kickoff, have focused on reducing the portion of kickoffs that are returned and have not fully satisfied NFL leaders.
The number of concussions suffered by players increased last season, and league officials have vowed to do all that they can to address that. The NFL also has barred players from wearing certain models of helmets that performed poorly in laboratory testing of impact absorption.
