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Kevin SeifertNFL Nation
NFL officials have only thrown a single flag for the league's new use of helmet rulers in the first 14 games of Week 1, another sign that the penalty does not include a penalty. will not have as much impact as once on the regular season.
The penalty was imposed on Ron Parker, the Kansas City Chiefs defensive midfielder, for bowing his head in order to contact an opponent. Sunday's ejection of the Cincinnati Bengals safety Shawn Williams was due to unnecessary roughness, not the rule of the helmet, according to the league.
Two games of week 1 remain to play. But barring a wave of flags on Monday night, the NFL will have orchestrated a significant drop in penalties imposed by the helm regulations since a chaotic summer.
In the first 33 games of the pre-season, officials reported 51 helmet rule fouls, averaging 1.55 per game. On August 22, after the Competition Committee issued a clarification to remind officials to avoid penalizing accidental or incidental contact, their numbers dropped by nearly 60%.
There were nine such penalties at week 3 of the pre-season and 11 at week 4, for a combined average of 0.625 per game.
NFL officials said they hoped the helmet rule would eventually change the way football is played. Al Riveron, senior vice president of the league for refereeing, said last month that the league wanted the focus to be on lowering the head to reach the lower levels of the match.
At the same time, the NFL has been trying to make it clear that it did not expect the changes to happen in one season – and never intended to overtake this season's games with penalties. NFL Executive Vice President Troy Vincent said in May that it was "really unrealistic" to wait for compliance the next day.
In the end, the pre-season peak in the flags could be considered as an inconsequential parameter setting for the development of future techniques.
"There are some things that are incidental contacts and that are part of this sport," said Vincent. "There are some things that you just have to live with and agree on, and then there is the part of our role and responsibility, what do we want to do for the players to adapt? Some of these things are longer term.
"Thinking that an individual player will make some adjustments between May 1 and the start of the season, while that's what I've been doing all my life? It's unrealistic. It's really unrealistic. "
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