By Sean Millington,
CFL.ca
On March 9, the CFL’s Board of Governors released a summary of changes they had made to the rules of the game. According to the official statement, these rule changes are intended to “promote the safety of players while at the same time ensuring our game continues to develop and prosper as an entertaining product.”
I, on the other hand, believe most of these changes are a matter of optics — changes being made for the sake of change. It’s more or less a publicity play in the same way that my university professors would change the order of the chapters in their textbooks for the next semester, making the current version useless and forcing the purchase of a new book. The changes being made to the rules, for the most part, are not truly needed. The only necessary modification was the change to the rule regarding blocking on kick returns, and this was only needed because of tinkering done the previous year.
The return to defining a player as having four sides and it only being illegal to contact him in the back was a good change, and at least the Board of Governors displayed the humility to recognize they had made a mistake and fixed it. As for the rest of the rule changes, only the kick from scrimmage going out of bounds in flight between the 20-yard lines is somewhat justifiable. Under the new rule, these kicks will be subject to a penalty with the receiving team having the option of taking the ball from where it went out of bounds or having a 10-yard penalty applied against the kicking team, with the down repeated. Ironically, despite this being an attempt to modernize the game, it actually is more of a return to football’s roots in rugby. In rugby, it is illegal to kick the ball out of bounds in the air. I feel this change was unnecessary. The league has seen many exciting returns and lots of good football played with the rule as it was before. To me this just smacks of tinkering.
A snap down from a two-point stance to a three-point stance will now be subject to a penalty as it is intended to draw the defensive player offside. This is a ridiculous change. Of course the snap down is intended to draw players offside, just as is using a snap count more than one! Are we going to make that illegal as well? If a defensive player doesn’t have the sense to do what he has been taught since the Pee Wee leagues, which is keep your eyes on the ball, then he deserves to be penalized.
As for the rules modified to improve player safety, they also seem pointless to me. They sound good but they weren’t needed. In my experience, I didn’t see a lot of guys get injured due to them being hit while on the ground. The new rule states that now you may only touch them down if they are not trying to advance the ball. The same goes for the rule making it illegal to tackle a player by grabbing the inside collar of the side or back of the shoulders. Sounds good in theory but once again I didn’t see a lot of players getting hurt due to this.
The unnecessary roughness rule states that it is illegal to contact a player in an unnecessarily rough fashion above the head. That rule has been changed to specifically mention the long snapper in order to afford him more protection. First off, that protection could have been provided merely by enforcing the existing rule more thoroughly, and secondly, in speaking with a long snapper with many years experience in the league, he felt this change was unnecessary. For all the years he played, he didn’t get hurt secondary to someone taking him out while snapping and he couldn’t think of another snapper who had.
The bottom line for me is these changes are about tinkering and change for change sake than there being any real need for them. I just wish the CFL could get over its inferiority complex and just realize what a great game it is. I subscribe to the theory if it’s not broke don’t fix it and maybe a few more Board of Governors should as well.
Sean Millington played 13 years in the CFL with the Edmonton Eskimos, Winnipeg Blue Bombers, B.C. Lions and Toronto Argonauts and has been a panellist on the CFL on CBC since 2003.
(The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of the Canadian Football League)
