The NFL had a terrible season off the field, but a very good one on it when it mattered most, in the playoffs. Some of the games were especially riveting--Dallas beating Detroit 24-20, Green Bay beating Dallas 26-21, and then Seattle beating Green Bay in overtime, 28-22. Indeed, the Seahawks' comeback might have been the most dramatic I've seen in a playoff game.
So we now have the kind of Super Bowl in six days that the league and advertisers dream of and which might even justify all of the hype--the evil genius Bill Belichick (most recently accused of underinflating footballs) and pretty boy Tom Brady's New England Patriots against the brash, trash-talking Seahawks, who may have the best defense of any team since the 1985 Bears and are now on the verge of becoming the first repeat champions in a decade (since the Belichick/Brady 2004 Patriots, of course).
So most of the arrows are suddenly pointing up again for the NFL. But to keep them pointing that way, the league should consider the following three rule changes for next season.
First, get rid of instant replay altogether, rather than expand its use, as many are suggesting. Replay has dulled the skills of the officials by creating a built-in system of back-seat driving and slowed what were already overly long games to a crawl. It hasn't improved the quality of the calls, as intended, or even reduced the level of controversy over them (to the contrary, it has simply pushed those controversies to a higher level, in which we now argue over whether the replay official up in the booth got it right instead of those calling the game on the field).
The Dez Bryant "non-catch" near the end of the Cowboys-Packers game also illustrates how the system no longer works the way it was supposed to. Originally, replay was intended to correct only particularly egregious mistakes, thus the requirement that there had to be "irrefutable" evidence that a call was wrong to overturn it. Deference was to be extended to the calls on the field and only a small percentage was expected to be reversed.
The problem with the Bryant call was that there wasn't anything remotely irrefutable seen on the replays. You could probably put 100 people in a room armed with the NFL's official "catch" definition (as tortured and ambiguous as it is) and you'd probably get pretty close to an even split as to whether or not he caught the ball according to that definition. Which is precisely why the play should have stood as originally called, as a completed pass to the one-yard line. The fact that we're still arguing so much over whether it was a catch is thus the best argument that it was.
In short, and as is so often the case, replay didn't work the way it was supposed to.
Replay began back in 1999 as an experiment. That experiment has now failed on its own terms, so let's try another experiment and go next year without it and see what happens.
The second obvious rule change would be to get rid of the most boring play in football--the perfunctory extra point kicked after touchdowns. They've now become so automatic that their only purpose is to provide kitchen and bathroom breaks.
The solution is to make the extra point more challenging by dropping the kick and forcing teams to run plays after every touchdown from the two-yard line, where the two-point conversions are currently spotted. Keep the two-point conversion but move it back to the five.
Doing this would not only make the extra point more challenging, and thus exciting, but also make virtually every close game more exciting as well. A team that scored what used to be a late "tying" touchdown would now have to still make a tough extra point by passing or rushing it in from the conversion spot to actually gain that tie. Actually, the dynamics of every game would be altered in all kinds of intriguing ways.
Third, and most urgently (if urgently can be used to describe a change needed for so many decades now), switch to the college football penalty for pass interference, which is a maximum of 15 yards rather than an automatic spot foul.
No call is more subjective and thus prone to error than pass interference. Yet no other penalty is so harsh and thus significant in its effect on a given game's outcome. That combination of great potential for error and great consequence for error is why change is necessary.
No penalty should award the other team with what amounts to a touchdown, but that is what happens when pass interference is called in the end zone and the ball is placed on the one-yard line. Pass-interference calls have become so rewarding in an increasingly pass-happy league that teams now look for them after almost every pass play and long-range heaves are tossed more in the hope of drawing flags rather than getting completions.
Bottom line: The college penalty works better because it reduces the consequences of what are inherently error-prone judgment calls.
And as for Sunday, lest we forget: Seahawks over Pats, 23-17.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 01/26/2015