Peter King on the recent officiating (Rams come up)

The NFL says it won’t compromise on officiating.

By Peter King

http://mmqb.si.com/2014/08/18/san-francisco-49ers-levis-stadium-debuts/

“Points of emphasis” are the three dirty words for defensive players around the league after two weeks of preseason games. But don’t expect the crackdown on defensive clutching and grabbing by the league’s 17 crews to soften once the real games begin in 17 days, league vice president of officiating Dean Blandino said Sunday afternoon.

“We’re not going to change how we’re calling the games once the regular season starts,’’ Blandino told The MMQB.

That despite the epidemic of flags over the weekend, the second straight preseason weekend with heavy-handedness by the officials. Comparing accepted penalties in last season’s average game with the first two weeks of 2014 preseason football (not including Monday night’s Cleveland-Washington game):

Penalties Per Game……………………….Penalty Yardage Per Game
Average game, 2013 season………….12.2105.6
2014 Preseason Week 1…………………17.7145.3
2014 Preseason Week 2…………………20.8174.4

“The way the game’s being officiated now is the way it’s going to be officiated when the season begins,” Blandino said from his office in New York. “We have to remain consistent. I knew we’d see a spike in calls when we put out these points of emphasis. But coaches adjust, and players adjust. They have to, and they know it. And we’ll correct our officials when we feel they’re being over-zealous with certain calls.

“Plus, I would say that between 70 and 75 percent of the calls I’ve gotten from teams after their games this preseason are asking the question, Why weren’t there more calls? I had a call today from a team with seven questions, and six were, Why wasn’t a foul called on this play?”

Some background: The NFL’s Competition Committee felt after last season there was too much grabbing and hand-fighting between defenders and receivers beyond the five-yard bump zone past the line of scrimmage. So the committee told the officiating department to emphasize two defensive penalties—defensive holding (grabbing jerseys and arms to throw receivers off course) and illegal contact more than five yards beyond the line—the kind of purposeful bumping beyond incidental contact that’s become a regular part of pass defense. (In addition, the committee ordered more attention paid to illegal hands to the face, which most often occurs between offensive and defensive linemen. In the past, if a tackle was sparring with a defensive end and his hand scraped the helmet of the defender, the officials would let it go; officials would flag only prolonged contact to the face. Now officials have been told to call any contact of a hand to the face.)

The league is determined to cut down the amount of sparring beyond the five-yard bump zone. “The jersey-grabbing and holding downfield, especially,” cornerback Joe Haden of the Browns told me the other day. “That’s what they’ve emphasized to us.”

“He’s dead on,” said Blandino. “You can’t grab the jersey of a receiver anymore.”

Interesting upshot of this: One assistant coach said recently that if he were advising the receivers on his team, he’d tell them to wear loose, Triple-XL jerseys, to make it easier for defenders to grab. His theory was, why not try to attract penalties if the officials are going to be looking so hard to find the jersey-grabs?

The one team that’s hammered the point home effectively through two weeks of games is St. Louis. The Rams have their defensive backs practicing in pass coverage while holding two tennis balls, to limit the temptation to hold receivers’ jerseys and to grab their arms beyond the five-yard bump zone. In two games the Rams have zero defensive pass interference penalties, zero illegal-contact penalties, and two defensive holding penalties on defensive backs—both by rookie nickel back LaMarcus Joyner.

I asked Blandino if the league could take games with nine more flags, on the average, over last season—if this weekend’s pace held. Of course, there’s no guarantee it will. Blandino said last year’s numbers are a bit misleading, because they were relatively low compared to previous years. Thus, the theory goes, defenders were getting away with too many infractions that should have been called but weren’t, because officials were letting too much contact go. “I believe that once you see the players adjust, you won’t see this exhorbitant number of calls,” he said. “Downfield contact was underofficiated last year.”

Coaches know they have to bang it into their players’ heads in the next two weeks. “It’s been a point of emphasis coming into the season,” said Colts coach Chuck Pagano. “We’ve been harping on it in the whole offseason program, OTAs, minicamp, and all through training camp. You can kind of see where the weekend’s going, including our game, as far as the emphasis on illegal contact, offensive pass interference, defensive pass interference, holding, all those things in the back end. You’re allowed five yards, and then after five yards you’ve got to get off guys and you can’t have contact. We’ve got to do a better job coaching it.”

Agreed, but however it’s coached, the game’s not going to be as good if, as we just saw this weekend, there are nine more flags, and nine more stoppages of play, in the average NFL game once the real games start.

Fifteen minutes. Twenty flags. That was the second quarter of the Tennessee-New Orleans game Friday night. The flag-happy crews in the first two weeks of the preseason leave fans everywhere wondering: Is this what 2014 football is really going to look like? If so, is there a Rugby Channel on TV this fall?

There were 32 accepted penalties for 295 yards at the Superdome on Friday. The football was most unwatchable during a three-minute span of the second quarter, when the teams ran 10 plays that counted and there were 11 penalties called. (Two plays were erased by penalty, meaning that 12 plays were actually run, but only 10 counted.).

Net yards gained in 3 minutes: 56.
Yards penalized in 3 minutes: 88.

I have said all along that the calls made in Week 2 of the preseason could well be different than the calls made on Week 1 of the regular season. We’ll see.