The NFL has a pair of new helmet rules that, based on the first preseason game, will be enforced aggressively and repeatedly. The two second-year safeties in the Jets’ starting lineup vow not to let the new rules affect their game.
“I’m not going to change the way I play,” Marcus Maye told Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News. “And I don’t expect the other safeties around the league to change the way they play.”
Jamal Adams likewise thinks that the new helmet rules won’t have a major impact on the game.
“It’s a technique thing,” Adams (pictured) told Mehta. “You got to change your philosophy of hitting. . . . At the end of the day, you’re staying safe. A form tackle is chest up, eyes up, see what you’re hitting. That’s the nucleus of the game of football. Keeping your head up. That’s keeping everybody safe. So that’s not going to take anything out of the game. Obviously, it’s going to take away the bigger hits . . . but at the end of the day you can still be aggressive.”
You can be aggressive, but there’s a new level of care that will be required -- a potentially impossible expectation that, as a defensive player tries to make a form tackle, he might lower his helmet and initiate contact with the opponent, inadvertently but also unmistakably. And if the rules are indeed enforced literally, the intention to perform a form tackle and not use the helmet as a weapon won’t matter.
“We’re just as curious as you guys,” Adams told Mehta regarding the enforcement of the rule. “Trust me. I’m not a ref, so I can’t really sit here and tell you how they’re going to call it. Obviously, we’re going to find out a little bit more in the preseason. . . . They’re going to throw a lot of flags to see how we can judge it. It’s going to take time for us as a defense to sit there and understand what they’re looking for. But at the end of the day, you can’t lead with your helmet. You can’t lead with your crown. You can’t lead with your eyes down. You got to see what you hit.”
“It’ll be interesting here in the preseason to see how it goes ... and see how the referees adjust to it and how the players adjust to it,” Maye added. “Hopefully it’s not something that they call 10 times a game. But you never know.”
It may not be something they call 10 times per game. But there were four helmet infractions on Thursday night. If that’s the the average once the real games begin, more than 1,000 extra flags will be flying from Week One through Week 17.
