New Rules
 

A few changes in rules for 2011 season.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nfl-r...-primer-2011-3

Overall, it seems a lot of injuries occurred on kickoffs so they tried to address this
1. kickoff from 35 rather than 30, more likely to go into endzone and have a touchback.
2. kicking team only 5 yard run-up rather than 15 to I guess keep speed down a little.
3. two other suggested changes were not made, keeping a two man wedge and keeping touchback is to 20 yard line.
Getting it right on scores another concern, so, now every score will have an automatic booth review.

Overall, seems okay to me.

They'll need those touchbacks to save time to make up for the extra time needed to automatically review every touchdown, especially the obvious ones.

Given the Texans sucked at kickoff returns last year, this actually helps them, at least short term.

They seem to have a penalty on ever kick off, at least the Texans do, cut down on those and you speed the game up.

I think the key motivator is that there's about one guy a year, on average, that gets paralyzed on a kick return (we had one about 2-3 yrs ago) which has got to be a major workers comp and lawsuit liability. Less kickoff returns mean less chance of downfield collisions. As I've said before, football could improve the equipment considerably if they didn't mind the expense and the less-violent way the players would probably look but, instead, the NFL would rather risk somebody spending their life in a wheelchair than make the uniforms safer.

I agree, the helmet alone has not been upgraded in years. How about using the lighter carbon fiber which would lower the whiplash accidents. As for concussion the lighter helmet might help but the padding area would be the area of focus on that.

Never mind the carbon fiber helmet idea. Seems carbon fiber has poor impact strength and makes a poor helmet.

http://www.carbonfiberguru.com/2010/...otbal-helmets/

Of course, there is also the slightly counterintuitive train of thought that the continued improvement of modern football equipment fosters injuries as well because the players grow increasingly fearless and use their bodies as weapons. If everyone was to put leather helmets back on, I suspect we would see a significant drop in spearing.

Just food for thought on a slow offseason.

OK, so much for surrogate posting.

Let them all play nekkid except for a helmet so we know which team the player is on. That would cut down on injuries and likely chase Tebow out of the league..:rolleyes: