Definition of a Defenseless Player

The following is taken from the 2011 NFL Rule Book (pages 73-74) and defines players who are in a defenseless posture.  The material is also covered in the 2011 League Policies for Players Manual, distributed to all players in training camp.

It is a foul if a player initiates unnecessary contact against a player who is in a defenseless posture.

(a)   Players in a defenseless posture are:

(1) A player in the act of or just after throwing a pass;

(2) A receiver attempting to catch a pass; or who has completed a catch and has not had time to protect himself or has not clearly become a runner. If the receiver/runner is capable of avoiding or warding off the impending contact of an opponent, he is no longer a defenseless player;

(3) A runner already in the grasp of a tackler and whose forward progress has been stopped;

(4) A kickoff or punt returner attempting to field a kick in the air;

(5) A player on the ground at the end of a play;

(6) A kicker/punter during the kick or during the return;

(7) A quarterback at any time after a change of possession, and

(8) A player who receives a “blindside” block when the blocker is moving toward his own endline and approaches the opponent from behind or from the side.

(b) Prohibited contact against a player who is in a defenseless posture is:

(1) Forcibly hitting the defenseless player’s head or neck area with the helmet, facemask, forearm, or shoulder, regardless of whether the defensive player also uses his arms to tackle the defenseless player by encircling or grasping him; and

(2) Lowering the head and making forcible contact with the top/crown or forehead/”hairline” parts of the helmet against any part of the defenseless player’s body.

Note: The provisions of (2) do not prohibit incidental contact by the mask or helmet in the course of a conventional tackle on an opponent.

Penalty: For unnecessary roughness: Loss of 15 yards. The player may be disqualified if the action is judged by the official(s) to be flagrant.

Ray Anderson on Mike & Mike: “We are going to protect our players” with stricter enforcement of rules against illegal hits

NFL executive vice president Ray Anderson (right) discussed today on ESPN Radio’s Mike & Mike Show the need for more stringent enforcement of the current rules against illegal hits to the head.

“If there are flagrant and egregious violations of our current rules, we will be enforcing discipline at a higher level,” Anderson said.  “We need to get our players firmly in line with the current rules, and that’s what our intentions are, effective immediately.”

“There is no intent to change any rules,” Anderson continued. “We are just going to enforce the existing rules much more to the letter of the law so that we can protect our players.”

“We understand that this is not just about the NFL. This is about safety at our level at the college level, at the high school level, at the peewee level, because we are the standard bearer. We are committed to safety at the highest level. We will take all the criticism and all the backlash against those who say that we are acting too aggressively in this regard,” Anderson added. “We are not going to be apologetic. We are not going to be defensive about it.  We’re going to protect our players and hopefully players at the lower levels as well.”

Following are excerpts from Anderson’s interview:
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Commissioner Goodell: “The faster we can get back to mediation, the faster we will get an agreement”

Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke to the media this afternoon following the NFL Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

“The faster we can get back to mediation, the faster we will get an agreement,” Commissioner Goodell said. “We made a lot of progress in mediation. The 17 days we were there forced us all to consider our positions, find the common ground, negotiate, and come up with solutions for the issues that we’ve all addressed that are important to the game, important to the players and important to the clubs.  I’m hopeful that we’ll get back there and resume them.”

Following is the transcript from the Commissioner’s press conference:

NFL COMMISSIONER ROGER GOODELL

NFL ANNUAL MEETING – NEW ORLEANS, LA

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Good afternoon.  We had a good two days of meetings.  Our primary focus was obviously on our labor dispute and on our planning and preparation on that.   The second piece was obviously this is our annual meeting and we traditionally focus on our football-related matters, including the Competition Committee report which we did yesterday and again voted on all of those matters today.

On an operational plan if the players are granted an injunction blocking the lockout:

I can tell you that we are prepared for every eventuality.  What we have said over the last couple of years is that our goal and our objective here is to get a collective bargaining agreement that is fair to all parties.  We want to do that as fast as possible but we also recognize that we had to be prepared for other alternatives.  Clearly, the union chose to litigate and we knew that was a possibility.  We are prepared for that. 

On the goal of his letter to NFL players:

It happens frequently when you get into labor disputes.  What the ownership wanted to make sure was that the players knew what their leadership had walked away from in the mediation process.  We sent that directly to the players.  They are claiming not to be a union but we think it was important for us to send that so the players understood what the owners had offered and what came out of the mediation process.  I understand there is usually a reaction when those things happen but the most important thing is that people are informed.
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Transcript of conference call with Rich McKay & Ray Anderson

Following is a transcript of today’s conference call with NFL Competition Committee Chairman Rich McKay and NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Ray Anderson:

NFL Competition Committee Chairman Rich McKay and

NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Ray Anderson

NFL Annual Meeting Conference Call

March 16, 2011

Ray Anderson:  Our Competition Committee meetings, as you know, started in Indianapolis and continued here in Naples, FL for seven days.  It seems like forever.  Certainly a big focus of both of those meetings was player safety.  I’ll just say a few words on the process of our discipline and then turn it over to Rich to review some of the proposed advancement to player safety rules and other focuses that we’ve had in these meetings.  With regard to the discipline process per se, we discussed that subject at length with the committee with regard to our safety rules enforcement and the emphasis and the upgrades that we had during the 2010 season.

The Competition Committee was fully supportive of the way discipline was handled, but we always know that there are ways to improve and we plan to do that with more communication in advance to players, clubs and coaches with regard to what is expected.  But the committee certainly fully supported the aggressive protection of defenseless players and aggressive protection against unnecessary hits to the head, neck area, and illegal helmet hits.  We understand that we need to continue in terms of disciplining to discourage repeat offenders and flagrant violators and hold not just players but coaches and clubs accountable for playing to and coaching to the rules.  There will be strong support in the 2011 season for making sure that players understand that, when warranted, suspensions will be an effective discipline for us.  We don’t want to go there, but if we must we’re prepared to do that because these rules are meant to protect everybody on the field and all are accountable to those player safety rules.  So discipline, and aggressive discipline, for these player safety rules and violations, particularly the ones that we all know can be devastating, will be an emphasis in 2011 and we’ll be able to answer your questions about more specifically what that might entail at the end of the session, but there’s a clear acknowledgment that we need to be aggressive in disciplining and we will give very clear advance notice to all players and all clubs as to what that could potentially entail.

With that, I’ll turn it over to Rich McKay, our chairman.

Rich McKay:  Let me go back a little bit and just go through our Competition Committee process.  For those of you that have been on this call before I know you’ve probably heard it before, but I do want to go through it.  We survey all the clubs, all the coaches, all the general managers to do a couple of things: number one, to review what went on in 2010, to review the changes that we implemented in 2010 and to get their feedback on the same, and also to look at any proposals they may have – any ideas they may have – with respect to 2011.  We did that again this year.

We then go to Indianapolis where we have a session with the players. We meet three days as a committee. We have a session with the players, an afternoon session. We had a long session with the Coaches Subcommittee – Coach Madden’s subcommittee. We get all their feedback on the rules that we’re talking about proposing. This year much of the focus was on the safety rules. Then as both Greg and Ray said we go to Naples and we spend seven days. In Naples what we do is we go through every suggestion brought up by clubs, fans, media, the Coaches Subcommittee, and we try to digest the players’ feedback that we got in Indianapolis and how we should incorporate that into proposals. This year, I would say that we have probably the smallest number of playing rule proposals I remember in a long time. There are only five playing rule proposals and in reality three major proposals, if you will. We have no by-law proposals and we have a number of positions and clarifications.  I’ll go through the major playing rule proposals now and I’ll let you ask questions when we get to the end of it.
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