What Changes Should Roger Goodell and NFL Owners Consider Implementing For 2014 Season?

Roger Goodell

Now that the Scouting Combine is in the books, the NFL’s offseason action is heating up with free agency opening on March 11th and the annual owners’ meetings taking place from March 23-26. Some of the items that will be discussed figure significantly into how the 2014 season will unfold. Below is a preview of some of the topics that will be discussed by players, coaches, front office execs, and the big man in charge: Roger Goodell.

I, Nick DeWitt, shared my thoughts on the main issues at hand. And to really think outside the box, I collaborated with my TSD cohort, Thomas Emerick, in an attempt to help improve the game for the upcoming season.

And remember: Change is good.

Franchise tags: To tag or not to tag?

Nick DeWitt: The situation with Jimmy Graham highlights just how unhealthy the franchise tagging system has become for the NFL. Graham can be viewed as greedy for wanting wide receiver money for playing tight end at a high level. The Saints can be looked at as cheap if they don’t pony up for their best receiver.

Player after player gets victimized by the tag. Jairus Byrd was forced to settle for the $6.9 million-tag price after his first contract in Buffalo expired. He would have made roughly double that on the market.

Teams use the tag to extend their negotiating window with players that are demanding big pay days. Non-exclusive tags provide an exit for players, but only if teams are willing to give up draft pick compensation that is ridiculously steep.

A better path to follow would be baseball’s arbitration process. Players have arbitration years after their initial contracts. The team retains control of the player, but the player can take his case for a bigger payday to court and have an independent party decide which figure is reasonable. In the NFL, the league could give teams two years of arbitration with a player before free agency. That would ease the pressure to extend star players and would also give players a shot at a realistic payday for their skill sets.

Thomas Emerick: Dashon Goldson left the Niners last offseason to test the open market. And the 28-year-old safety struck a five-year, $41 million deal with $22 million guaranteed in Tampa. Safety Antrel Rolle, then 27, left Arizona in 2010 to sign a five-year, $37 million offer from the Giants.

Jairus Byrd was a far superior safety to both of them upon reaching the end of his rookie contract in 2013, yet had to settle for a one-year stint and $6.9 million instead of earning his worth in free agency. This courtesy of that year’s positional value per the non-exclusive franchise tag, which would’ve required two first-rounders on top of a matching offer to free Byrd from Buffalo’s inequitable strangle-hold.

Byrd had to watch Goldson—Pro Football Focus‘ 20th-ranked safety in 2013—find the compensation and long-term security of an elite safety in his prime, while the safety who graded out No. 2 that year was denied the chance to test his market value at the conclusion of his rookie deal. And from the fan perspective, all the acrimony from franchise tag-related holdouts can be avoided if players have more of a viable out in these situations.

Expansion of challenges and replay

DeWitt: Bill Belichick, during a news conference in the middle of the 2013 season, said that coaches should be able to challenge any two plays in a game. Belichick’s anger over the issue of challenges is understandable since his Patriots lost a game in Carolina against the Panthers on a call that was questionable at best.

That wasn’t the first time it’s happened to the Patriots, but in a season of frustrating officiating, the image of Tom Brady battering the officials verbally as they left the field is memorable.

The question Belichick, and now many others are asking is, “why not?” With only two challenges and the penalty of a timeout for an incorrect one, coaches aren’t likely to abuse the system. Let them challenge anything they want. Even penalties should be brought under the umbrella since they can sometimes determine the outcome of a game.

Emerick: Illegal helmet-to-helmet hits should be made reviewable when the point of dispute is whether contact was actually made with the helmet. This is a fairly cut-and-dry interpretation that comes down to the same line of reasoning as whether a punt touched one of the players on the receiving team.

Slow-motion replay is a beautiful thing and has simple utilization here. Referees possess but human eyes and miss these types of calls constantly. So why not ensure that teams have a defense against clean hits involving a 15-yard penalty? Likewise, teams should have the ability to challenge when refs miss an obvious head shot.

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GIF via SportsGrid

What to do with the extra point?

DeWitt: Only five teams had a kicker with an unsuccessful PAT attempt last season.

Five failures in 1,267 attempts translates to a 99.6 percent success rate. Does the low-level of drama alone mean that tradition should be thrown out the window?

Kickoffs are in danger of going away in the name of player safety. If kickoffs and extra points disappear, kickers will have little value beyond field goals. How long before field goals or, even more likely, punts disappear?

Change for the sake of change isn’t something worth doing. If the NFL is going to be America’s second pastime, it needs some kind of tradition to hold onto as it progresses into the future. Plenty of plays in baseball add little drama to a game, but they’ve been preserved because the tradition matters.

Emerick: I think we can admit this is a waste of the finite amount of time we all have on this Earth. Who really benefits from watching several extra points on Sunday? Because I’ll speak on behalf of the world in saying that it’s not the viewer. The only time this exercise becomes remotely exciting is when the kick is missed, which would be due to fluke or pure incompetence.

An alternative idea has been floating around where a team can choose the automatic one extra point or instead go for two. This maintains the extra-point strategy for in-game management while keeping the thrill of the conversion try from the two. All we lose is the monotonous 20ish-yard field goal worth one point.

New emphasis on player safety

DeWitt: Let’s take a look at some powerful words which came out of Brandon Meriweather’s mouth just a few months back.

“I guess I just got to take people’s knees out…You just have to go low now, man. You’ve got to end people’s careers. You got to tear people’s ACLs and mess up people’s knees. You can’t hit them high anymore.”

Meriweather’s words may seem immature. They may seem like an overreaction. But in today’s NFL, he’s echoing the sentiments of many a defensive back or linebacker. The league’s increased attention to head injuries has opened a chasm between players and the league.

No one knows what will and what won’t end up leading to a fine.

Perhaps the best move the NFL can make here would be to take the focus off of fining and suspending players, and shifting over to educating players. They can hold clinics in the offseason that teach the tackling technique the NFL wants defenders to use. And they can also have officials show video of what is and is not a penalty, to cut down on grey area.

Instead of fines, why not have players attend workshops when they mess up? Fines do nothing but make blood boil and create bad blood. If player safety and not grabbing extra money is the goal, then the process needs to be educational instead of punitive.

A player’s knees are just as important to his health as his head. The league must strike some kind of balance there. But that balance is only part of the equation. Players can’t strike that balance on the field if they don’t practice proper technique. 

And they cannot practice proper technique until they know exactly, without question, what that technique must look like.

Emerick: Defensive backs have offered some great soundbites over the past year about what they must do in the area of players’ knees to avoid a fine, which is violently passive-aggressive and certainly on the league’s radar.

I do sympathize with defensive backs as the window for which they can hit pass-catchers grows more narrow and more confusing. They get hosed repeatedly with undeserving 15-yard penalties and that should be addressed. But let’s not just accept wrecked knees as collateral damage for protecting the head.

You can argue that the play below happened to a defenseless receiver, even if not in the NFL’s current terms. Pass catchers’ knees should get at least some small fraction of the protection that their heads rightly receive, so we can avoid this as much as possible.

Dustin Keller

GIF via SB Nation

How to fix the scheduling issues:

DeWitt: Thursday Night Football was the sole province of NFL Network; well, until a deal with CBS changed everything for next season. The problem is that not everyone can watch NFL Network. The other problem is that the quality of play, highlighted by a Week 9 contest between playoff-contending Miami and Cincinnati, is markedly lower.

The short week to prepare and rest up seems to take its toll as the season moves along and players get more dinged up. 

Saturday games seem to be the best course of action here. More people would be likely to watch because they don’t have to go to work or school in the morning. People watching college football all day might be burned out on the college game and welcome a switch to the pros. 

TV executives for college football are likely to oppose any such move because of lucrative profits, but the NFL could move the games back to their own network to remove conflicts for CBS, NBC, and ESPN. If they want to feature games on CBS on Thursday night, perhaps the best move would be to slot the London games in there and have three or four per year. 

Emerick: Thursday Night Football gave us very little in the way of entertaining games during the first half of the 2013 slate before producing some close ones from midpoint on. The Bears and Giants battled to that hideous 27-21 final and the season’s TNF highlight—Bengals vs. Dolphins in Week 9—featured poor play and even a game-ending safety on Andy Dalton. Yuck.

While I don’t think there’s enough evidence to prove a major quality of play difference on Thursday night compared to Sunday, it does seem like a tough deal from a planning and player recovery standpoint. Going back at it four days later just seems brutal.

It seems like moving Thursday games to Saturday makes more sense here, even if college football TV execs would probably oppose. With every major network tied to college ball on Saturday, who’s stopping the NFL from programming a 1 p.m., 4 p.m., and primetime Saturday game if Goodell wants to make it so?

Improving NFL’s conduct policy (Michael Sam, Richie Incognito, etc.)

DeWitt: Players in the NFL who later came out for being gay dates back decades. One has to wonder whether their teammates knew and they simply kept the secret to prevent public backlash and media attention.

With Michael Sam, the NFL gets its first test case of a player coming out before being drafted. Sam’s media circus is rivaling Tim Tebow’s and the spotlight only gets more glaring from here on out. 

The problem probably isn’t in most NFL locker rooms. The Wells Report on the Jonathan Martin fiasco is off-putting but isolated. There’s certainly some hazing for rookies in the NFL, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem outside of Richie Incognito. 

If the NFL players close ranks around Sam, the smaller part of the problem will be solved. The bigger part of the problem is the media, which will tie everything Sam does successfully or unsuccessfully to his sexual orientation. Every spot he drops in the draft will be made out to have a connection to this situation.

In the wake of the Incognito/Martin mess, the NFL has some work to do in making up ground on public image. The league can win big points by embracing Sam as they would any other player. If Sam’s first year in the NFL goes smoothly off the field, the league will be looked at more favorably than it is now.

Emerick: The culture in and around the NFL needs to grow more progressive for homosexual athletes and their supporters. If Michael Sam’s the first one to come out publicly during his playing career, there’s still growth ahead. According to the Houston Chronicle, the 1993 Houston Oilers fostered an accepting environment for two gay teammates and there may be several other unreported examples of the league being more progressive in the locker room than we all give it credit. But Sam’s announcement will present the NFL—and its fanbases—with its biggest test.

It might be worthwhile for the NFL to implore its most influential players to publicly and privately back Sam. There were concerns about how the hip-hop/R&B world would react when Frank Ocean came out of the closet, and he’s been largely embraced. It helps when Jay-Z and Kanye take you under their wing, and Odd Future calls you their own. A continuing endorsement from high-profile league figures could go a long away.

Cannabis use

DeWitt: At the risk of sounding like an old man, I just don’t see why the NFL should allow cannabis.

The league touts itself as being a model institution. The players are, like it or not, perceived as role models for young boys all over the country and even the world. Allowing them to freely smoke weed deteriorates that image at a time when the league cannot afford to lose any more public relations ground.

The players, at least the ones who smoke, are going to make a strong push for this in the wake of Colorado and Washington legalizing pot. Since that change effects only two of the leagues 32 franchises, however, the time doesn’t seem right.

The NFL is a national institution. I don’t see a path to legalizing cannabis in the NFL until the entire United States allows it. It would send the wrong message at a time when Roger Goodell is continually battling the image of a dictator that is above regular ways of doing things.

Right or wrong, the league has to consider its public image in this decision. Standing firm on this issue now would buy them some ground overall. By making no change, the league can’t very well upset fans who want to see it legalized. The best move here is to do nothing at all.

Emerick: More than half of the NFL’s 32 team reside in a state that falls somewhere on the spectrum between legalized medical cannabis and outright legalization. Seattle and Denver gave us a Super Bowl and it’s likely they soon won’t be alone in team-hosting cities that have legalized cannabis.

It’s only a matter of time before the NFL’s own policies become more lenient on this matter, and give more leeway for individual teams to decide whether cannabis is negatively affecting a player’s image or performance. Already, the following teams play in states that have decriminalized cannabis: Bills, Patriots, Chargers, Niners, Raiders, Panthers, Vikings, Browns, Bengals and aforementioned legal-state squads (Broncos and Seahawks).

There’s a few coaches in the Western region of the United States that I imagine wouldn’t see a greater point in suspending their players for toking a few times during the offseason and it turning up on a drug test. Let’s say one of them might rhyme with, ummmmm, “Eat Arroll.” (Legal disclaimer: “Eat Arroll” could be anyone.)

Commissioner Goodell’s report card grade

DeWitt: Roger Goodell’s reputation has taken blow after blow in recent years. Bountygate was the most high-profile mess he was involved in, but his lack of consistency and direction is what maddens owners, coaches, players and fans.

Take into account two similar situations, both of which occurred on punt returns. Mike Tomlin stepped onto the field, either by accident or on purpose, and altered the path of Baltimore kick returner Jacoby Jones. Jones was tackled instead of scoring what looked like a sure touchdown. A few weeks later, a member of the San Francisco 49ers non-playing staff, either accidentally or on purpose, took out a Seattle Seahawks gunner during a return.

Both actions occurred without  severe penalty from the league office, even with them altering the outcome of the games.

Tomlin was fined $100,000 and the Steelers await word on whether or not they’ll lose a draft pick. The assistant was warned and the team not penalized at all. You can argue that Tomlin is the head coach and therefore must pay a bigger price. But why penalize the team? The play didn’t change anything about the playoff picture. Baltimore won the game.

Players are suspended in the same haphazard way. Ben Roethlisberger’s legal troubles in 2010 are well-known. He was given a six-game ban (later reduced to four) after an incident that never went to court for lack of evidence. That same year Vince Young was caught on camera assaulting someone in a Dallas night club. No punishment was handed down.

If Goodell is going to rehabilitate his image, he needs to gain consistency. Until then, he’s nothing more than a D-grade commissioner and an embarrassment to a league that really thrived under the leadership of Paul Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle.

Emerick: After navigating the lockout with a level of tact and success that is up for debate, Goodell probably hasn’t aided his approval rating with the reckless sheriff antics of the past two offseasons. A recent USA Today Sports poll puts that rating at 39 percent among players, and I’m guessing it dips much lower in Louisiana.

Imagine if former commissioner Paul Tagliabue suspended Bill Walsh and knifed through the Niners’ coaching staff during the 1984 offseason, over a matter that turned out to have as insufficient evidence as Bountygate did. The Saints possessed dynasty material and Goodell torpedoed it in a ham-handed attempt to increase the focus on player safety.

Allowing cap fines to hit the Redskins and Cowboys in 2012, especially right before free agency, was ludicrous. And that’s coming from a Giants fan. Those three black eyes overshadow Goodell’s role in the growth of the sport.

Goodell’s tenure thus far has been marred by failure, and he needs to consider implementing some changes to improve the game during the 2014 season and beyond.

About Nick DeWitt

A longtime fan of all Pittsburgh sports, Nick DeWitt has been working as a sportswriter since 2008. Before becoming a contributor to The Sports Daily, he'd been a Steelers Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report and a contributor for 412 Sports Talk. Beyond his work in sportswriting, he's a teacher, historian, and professional photographer.

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