The new rule of the NFL headphones is not popular with fans

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of NFL fans using SurveyMonkey. Each week we send 32 surveys to more than 100 connected fans from each team.

The NFL likes to shoot in the foot. Whether the 32 owners are frightened and exaggerated by the Twitter feed of a certain person or the suspension of players without any evidence of wrongdoing, the league has never encountered an unauthorized error.

This happens every spring when homeowners come together and adopt new rules. Remember all these years trying to understand exactly what it meant to catch a football? This year, we may have ended up solving this problem with a rare sense of common sense, but we came back this spring with the well-meaning and vaguely defined rule of what players could and could not do with their helmets.

The Refs threw the flag after flag during the pre-season, sometimes for shots that clearly had to be eliminated from the game and sometimes for shots that looked like a regular tackle. It was the biggest story of the exhibition season.

The players particularly talked about the rule. Apparently, a lot of fans share their opinion. According to SB Nation FanPulse, a national survey of NFL fans, 48% of fans think the new helmet rule is the worst in the league. And it's not even close.

This is more than the sample size of more than 2,500 respondents collected from readers of the 32 team brands in our network. Obviously, the band is more connected than your average player. It's not scientific, but it gives a glimpse of what fans are feeling about the new rule, with a huge gray area that the league and officials have struggled to define.

Finally, we had more details about the headset rule in effect last month, when she said in a statement that accidental or accidental contact with the helmet and / or face mask is not a violation. And, as Geoff Schwartz, retired NFL lineman, remarked, it is reasonable to expect officials and everyone else to fit into a consistent pattern.

None of this should ignore the fact that it is essential that the NFL do everything in its power to make the game as safe as possible. Football is not a game of violence, it's a game of skills and nuances … that's what makes it exciting.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that fans will be slow to give the league the benefit of the doubt, at least until the new rule becomes more systematic in its application. And let's not forget that for fans, no matter which rule costs your team 5, 10 or 15 yards, it's still the worst rule of the day.