NFL meeting to ban hip drop tackles.. (Update: Now banned)
Excellent video, especially the examples of players intentionally tacking appropriately to avoid the penalty. You’ve moved me from mostly ambivalent to firmly supporting this change.
I don’t trust the NFL refs to call anything correctly, so I anticipate a complete clownshow implementing this rule.
Every NFL ref crew should have an additional skybox ref. Have that ref constantly reviewing 15 yard/PI type penalties. They are already stopping the game to adjudicate the flag, so another few seconds for the skybox ref to indicate to the head ref whether the penalty was appropriate or not wouldn’t affect the flow of the game at all. Let the NFL teams use their two allotted challenges to also challenge any 15 yard/PI call/non-call.
I think that would get pretty close to solving a lot of the problems. The refs union should support that too as they’d be getting 16 new positions that would be appropriate for refs that are aging out due to physical health.