Here's an NFL brainteaser to end your week: If a penalty is never called, is it still a penalty?
Through six weeks of the 2021 season, referees did not make a single mention of the once-notorious "use of helmet" rule. Not one of the 1,391 flags thrown in 94 games were attributed to a rule the league heralded in 2018 as paradigm-changing, one designed to prohibit players from using a posture found to increase the chances of head, neck and spine injuries.
You might not have noticed amid the historic run of close games, field goal battles and the evolution of four-down offense. And, hey, that's OK. In most cases, we should welcome the absence of flags, because it should mean the fouls are not occurring. Yet anyone who watches an NFL game can see frequent uncalled violations of the helmet rule, which prohibits a player from lowering his helmet to initiate contact with an opponent. All of which makes us wonder why.
The answer is revealing in many ways. It demonstrates not only the limits of legislating danger out of football, but also how the NFL has attempted to camouflage that undeniable reality.
As it turns out, officials are still throwing flags for violations of the helmet rule. But the NFL has instructed referees not to mention it during the ensuing announcement, a spokesman confirmed this week. Instead, referees are referring to it as the more generic "unnecessary roughness." Asked why, NFL spokesman Michael Signora wrote in an email: "It enables the foul to be properly categorized after the fact during film review." Following review, Signora said, the helmet rule was flagged six times through the end of Week 6. For context, there were nine such calls in 2020 and 14 in 2019 during the same time period.
In its fourth season, in other words, the helmet rule has proved so difficult to officiate, and the chance for a mistake so high, that the NFL would prefer to avoid the conversation altogether. To be clear, there are no other similar fouls -- roughing the quarterback and illegal hits to defenseless receivers, among others -- that routinely receive a generic public explanation.
Waiting for a postgame review on the helmet rule just "doesn't hold water," said Dean Blandino, the former NFL officiating chief who now works as an analyst for Fox Sports.
"You can categorize it after the fact regardless of what the referee announced," Blandino said. "What they're doing ... is saying that when they're announcing it as 'use of helmet' everyone's going to analyze it, and that opens it up for criticism. If you keep it very general then there's no real opportunity to criticize because you don't know what the heck it is. It's just shortsightedness. It's trying to solve a perceived problem and creating a whole bunch of other problems."
There is no doubt that vague explanations minimize the opportunities for people in Blandino's position to point out officiating errors. But the lack of real-time transparency leads to needless speculation. It ultimately dents the credibility of NFL officiating at least as much as, if not more than, a controversial but accurate accounting.
Even at their worst, however, the generic announcements are a misguided attempt to clean up a mess caused by the core issue. The bigger problem is that the NFL knows how many of its worst injuries occur, but the behavior is so entwined in the game that it hasn't been able to conceive an effective rule to prevent it.
This all started, of course, in the fall of 2017 when a particularly violent stretch of games culminated in a December slugfest between the Cincinnati Bengals and Pittsburgh Steelers. In that game, Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier suffered a career-ending back injury after lowering his helmet to hit an opponent. Players from both teams suffered concussions on subsequent hits to the head, and afterward, NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent acknowledged that the league would consider a targeting-type rule for the 2018 season.
The NFL decided against mirroring the NCAA targeting rule, fortunately, and instead adopted the helmet rule, which it said was a decision based on biomechanical studies. Researchers found that a lowered head increased the force of a collision, elevating the risk of injury. As a result, owners adopted a hastily written rule in the spring of 2018 that called for a 15-yard penalty when a player -- offense or defense, anywhere on the field -- lowered his helmet to initiate contact with an opponent.
Pushback was furious and not entirely incorrect. That kind of contact was pervasive in the game and difficult to avoid; then-San Francisco 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman wrote at the time: "Even in a perfect-form tackle, the body is led by the head. The rule is idiotic [and] should be dismissed immediately."
Officials, meanwhile, noted the difficulty of seeing the prohibited action clearly, especially near the line of scrimmage, and determining which player caused the contact.
"It was hard, and we were bad at it," said retired referee John Parry, now an ESPN officiating analyst. "And I put myself in that category. I had officiated for 35 years and never had to call that as a foul."
But officials plowed ahead as instructed, throwing 51 flags for helmet rule violations in the first two weeks of the 2018 preseason, demonstrating how disruptive the rule could be to game flow if it were called closely. The NFL competition committee responded by amending the rule to discount "incidental" contact, while also emphasizing that the offending player must "initiate" contact to be flagged. From that point on, the rule has gone largely unenforced on the field.
Instead, the league began a practice of sending warning letters for uncalled fouls. It sent 130 during the 2018 season alone. All told, from 2018 to '20, there were 96 total fouls called for the helmet rule on 97,683 offensive plays. Of that total, 86.2% were on defensive players. If this season's pace of six over six weeks continues, the NFL will finish with the lowest per-game average of flags for the helmet rule since it was initiated.
"I can tell you this," Blandino said. "You're not changing behavior by calling six of them in six weeks."
There is certainly precedent for using rules to make the game safer for players. Fans of a certain age will remember how often quarterbacks were injured by violent hits before roughing the passer fouls were strengthened. Rules protecting defenseless receivers, meanwhile, have made dramatic changes to how much punishment pass-catchers absorb before they can brace themselves.
The helmet rule hasn't yet had anywhere close to that effect. NFL concussion numbers have dropped in each of the past three seasons, but that trend could be attributable to other factors, including a redesigned kickoff and an agreement with the NFL Players Association to ban low-performing helmets.
"This came from a good place," Blandino said. "We want to protect players from unnecessary risk. But you've got to vet it out and say, 'Can we implement this and officiate it consistently?' It's just a very broad rule and the potential for it on every play is so great that ultimately what the officials end up doing is saying, 'I'm not going to call it. It's going to have to really jump out or the league is going to have to tell me they'll downgrade me if I don't.'"
Perhaps public discussion of a dangerous posture is preferable to the absence of it, even if the prohibited action goes unpenalized. But it's hard to argue that the helmet rule has accomplished much more than that, and the NFL's efforts to shield it from public scrutiny is telling.