Arizona Cardinals: Seven New Rule Changes for 2016
By Erich Becker
A new season comes with new rules, for the Arizona Cardinals, and beyond.
With offseason meetings taking place, the competition committee has approved seven new rule changes for the upcoming 2016 season while leaving another proposed change on he table.
The new changes stem from competition as far as safety:
First, the extra point, long run from the two yard line before last season, then moved back to the 15 yard line for a 33 yard attempt. As CBSSports notes in their piece: Kickers missed a whopping 71 extra points last year, which was 8 more misses than the 7 years combined.” Two point conversions will still be run from the 2-yard line. Defenses can also run back blocked or woefully short extra point attempts.
Yikes. That looks like a great move unless you’re a Patriots fan.
Coaches can now communicate with players regardless of their position, either in the box, or on the field. Previously only coaches on the field could communicate directly with players, this makes it more logical as some coaches are more comfortable, and more effective, in the box.
The Chop Block has been removed completely from the game, making it illegal, previously only certain forms of the block were banned, now it is completely banned from the game from a player safety perspective.
The horse collar tackle has been expanded in scope to now include the player’s nameplate, not just the actual collar of their jersey, expect this to get a lot of scrutiny in the preseason and see a lot of 15-yard penalties called as the referees get more in-tuned with calling this one correctly.
Instead of a five yard penalty for a receiver touch a forward pass after going out of bounds, but re-establishing themselves in-bounds, this is now a loss of down rule. There aren’t many of those, and they all hurt.
You cannot call a timeout if you don’t have one, if you do, while play will be stopped, it will be to enforce a penalty against you. Once can assume the clock will still run at the referee’s signal as well.
Finally, the league eliminated “multiple spots of enforcement for a double foul after a change of possession.”
All in all, the changes look to increase player safety and formalize parts of the game that have been a gray area. Now if we could just define a catch, we’d all be in good shape as the 32 teams line up for the Draft and OTAs.