We talked about the NFL deciding to loosen up their celebration rules on Tuesday. That’s great, but that’s not the only rule that changed.
The league also formally approved the new rule that will allow two players to return from injured reserve during the season. That was first reported last week.
There were also two more significant changes we haven’t talked about.
First, the league shortened overtime from 15 to 10 minutes. They did so in the name of player safety, which is what they always say when they make dramatic changes to the game.
Anything that gives us less regular season football and more ties, frankly, sucks. We’re not buying the player safety argument, either. There are more certainly many, many more effective ways you could screw with the game to make it more safe.
Knocking five minutes off overtime is going to do nothing.
What the league should do is fix their frickin’ overtime. Go to a college-style format, which is both more exciting and equitable.
It almost seems as if the league just refuses to go that way because they didn’t come up with the idea first. That copying college football would damage too many owner egos.
But I digress.
The other rule change comes in the preseason. Teams will no longer have to trim their rosters to 75 players after the third week of the preseason. Instead, they’ll get to keep all 90 of their players — if they choose — all the way up to the final roster cutdown day.
That should make for quite the cluster the weekend before the season begins.
Overall, it looks like the league got two of these right. One they just can’t figure out how to get right even though the answer is right in front of them and we’ll see on the last one.