A couple good rules, or more precisely rule repeals, will be considered at the NFL owners meeting that takes place next week. Along with all the boring shit about tampering and waiting periods will be things that actually affect the game. They may seem minor, but when your team has third and three on the opponent's 25 with 40 seconds to go and this kind of bullshit stops the clock, they are the most important things in the world.
First is the elimination of the five yard facemask penalty. I never understood why this was ever a penalty at all. It's even called "incidental", implying that it just happened during the natural course of the play and was unintentional. The 15 yard version which qualifies as a personal foul would still remain, which is fine. To get that one you have to grab and pull or twist (ooh, I'm getting excited) the facemask and you could paralyze a guy doing stuff like that. But if this passes, no penalty if a player's fingers happen to get caught up in a guy's grill.
The second one is the almost-elimination of the force-out rule. If this passes, a player could catch the ball in the air and be pushed out of bounds before his feet hit the ground and be ruled incomplete. The same thing happens now anyway, but it always leads to a five minute official conference to determine if the player would have come down in bounds if he hadn't been pushed and it's just a mess. There's supposed to be some weird condition that exists where a player could still be ruled forced out if he is pulled out of bounds (I guess by a player that's already out of bounds?) but I don't understand it and won't worry about it right now.
Both of these proposals take a little more of the game out of the officials' hands and give it back to the players, and that's almost always a good thing. Other rule changes being considered are defensive players putting radios in their helmets, coin toss options, instant replay on field goal att... zzzzzzz.
