I sometimes get this out on Friday, but I took most of yesterday off to argue with people online about the hip drop rule. It seems to me that people can fall anywhere on this issue, and there’s not like a clear divide, where I assume some of you guys are completely on the opposite side of that issue from me.
One thing I did realize in those conversations is there’s a bit of an issue with the terminology, where it seems some people hear “hip drop” and think that refers to anything where the hips drop, essentially (can’t imagine why). What I’m hoping to see legislated out of the league is a specific type of tackle that has become more popular as a result of the league legislating the crown of the helmet stuff out.
I understand people think if you take both things away, that makes it all the more difficult for defenders to get ballcarriers on the ground, but at the same time there is apparently data that suggests a rate of injuries on this type of tackle 25 times that of other tackles. That’s really where the conversation stops for me, much in the way the conversation seems to stop for others at a point that says something like “they won’t have any other options” or “we have too many rules and penalties.”
Those are reasonable concerns, but not at the expense of this particular tackle. One of the things about Mark Andrews’ injury and the mechanism for high-ankle sprains is there are severities to these things. For Andrews, he’s already been ruled out for the year, presumably due to a fracture to the bone in the lower leg plus ligament damage.
I think tackles similar to what happened on the Andrews play should be legal, but that the issue for me is when defenders use some frankly really impressive upper body strength to swing their whole body weight up off the ground and into and through the lower body of the ballcarrier. If the defender on that play had stayed engaged with the ground and rolled up on Andrews, he might have still been injured, but the laws of physics suggest the force applied to his legs would not have been the same, because some of that would have been redirected into the ground.
This is the same thing that hurt Tony Pollard in the playoffs last year. And on the Andrews play, if you go back and watch it, what I would point you toward is how the defender winds up on top of Andrews at the end of the play — he swings back over top of Andrews. I would offer two still frames that are for me the crux of the issue.
I don’t think every similar tackle needs to be legislated out of the game, but in that first image we see the defender, even after engaging with the ground, swinging his legs and entire lower body up and into Andrews. In the second image, we see how he has swung completely up, over, and through Andrews. Again, this takes considerable upper-body strength; it’s almost like a wrestling or judo takedown. You’ll see the same thing in the Pollard injury from last year’s playoffs.
For me, it’s as simple as the defender can’t disengage entirely from the ground and swing their weight through the ballcarrier’s lower body. He could still grab him the same way, and even contact his lower legs while dragging him down, but he can’t use his entire body weight to swing into the lower legs — which in a split second are suddenly carrying 250 pounds more weight, and thus they become locked and have no flexibility or give. I don’t care if we don’t call this a “hip drop” — that term does seem to be slightly different in rugby than what I find the issue to be here.
But I just wanted to explain specifically what my Twitter stance refers to, because amid some bad faith discussions I got into some really interesting conversations with friends where it did seem their interpretation was a lot more vague than mine. I want to outlaw something very specific.
I do not care about what other options defenders will or won’t have, or these comments that we’ll all be soft and play two-hand touch. Honestly, while I don’t believe this is anywhere near necessary, if it came down to defenders needing to find a way to be in front of a guy because it’s impossible to tackle from behind, that’s fine to me. We’re talking about career-altering injuries in a sport with nonguaranteed contracts where many players can’t walk the same and play with their kids the same 10 years after they leave the league, which matters, too, even if it isn’t as shocking as the brain injury stuff.
But again, this tackle is a question of physics, and I’m fine with even slight alternatives; I am not arguing for removing every single tackle from behind that looks vaguely similar to this one. Here’s an explainer from Australia’s National Rugby League that breaks down how they delineated between similar tackle types; to be clear, I don’t think a rule for a different sport, football, should be written exactly the same.
For me, in football, it’s specifically about disengaging from the ground, fully hanging from the ballcarrier, and then swinging into the ballcarrier’s lower body — in a split second, before they have a chance to just go down. From a physics standpoint, you have mass moving one direction and there’s force behind that and none of that force is redistributed to the ground or elsewhere. It all goes directly into and through the lower leg of the ballcarrier. It’s the same general concept of how wrecking balls knock down buildings, and it’s effective.
I’ve seen people say that this type of tackle happens in every game, and I personally don’t believe that to be the case, at least not in the way I define it, which seems to maybe be a little different than others. I suggested on Twitter this has become a more popular tackle style recently (before seeing that note in the above linked tweet from Sam Schwartzstein that the league tracks this and it is indeed happening more), and I got several replies that it didn’t seem likely it was new. That tells me that there are different concepts floating around about this.
My anecdotal experience as someone who has obviously immersed himself in football in nearly every way for the majority of his life is definitely not the end-all, but as far as one person’s point of view (who maybe is decent at observing things about the sport), to me this is not as common as people think it is, there are alternatives even if the worst of these tackles are removed, and yes it has become more and more of an issue just in the past decade. I would go so far as to say that while I don’t consider it dirty because it’s clearly in the rules, that I imagine there are defenders who don’t approach it the way Logan Wilson did on Thursday night specifically because they are the type of player who sees the NFL as a brotherhood and they don’t want to put another player in harm’s way. I do think those players exist, and I do think they inherently understand that note I referenced earlier about injury rates on this tackle being 25 times higher.
There have been a lot of discussions on Twitter about how smaller guys are using this to take down bigger players, and a guy like Andrews is obviously a powerful runner with the ball. I hear that, and don’t have an immediate alternative for what they can do instead, because using your whole body weight as a battering ram swinging into the knees of a player is a very effective way to get them onto the ground. But to me it’s a no-brainer that the serious injuries aren’t a trade-off that should be necessary. If that makes lighter defenders less viable, fine. If it benefits offenses, fine. I realize I’m preaching to the choir of a fantasy football community here, but I really don’t understand the concern over that.
Anyway, let’s get to some input volatility spots. One thing I want to mention is I had a blast with a couple different podcasts this week. You can catch me on JJ Zachariason’s Late-Round Perspectives this week, where we talked about a lot more conceptual stuff than specifically focusing on Week 11 player takes. Also, on Stealing Bananas with Shawn Siegele, we updated our projections of the 2024 first and second rounds for redraft ADP next year. That has obviously implications for how we expect the rest of 2023 to go, as well as a lot of conversation about how the market will react to the trends of the 2023 season.
As always, rather than spending something like an hour on each game like I might for Stealing Signals, in this piece I fly through the games and spend maybe an hour on all of them combined.
Defer to good projections or the variety of great forward-looking stuff from the analysts I frequently reference — Kerrane; Overzet; Siegele and the RotoViz team; Leone, Silva, and the ETR guys — over my thoughts. I offer these considerations solely because you guys have asked, and because I might have a unique thought about a different part of a range of outcomes in some cases, relative to what you’re seeing elsewhere. I don’t offer these thoughts because I think they will be explicitly great predictions.
Cowboys at Panthers
I still think Tony Pollard has a ceiling.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the Panthers’ RB situation, but Miles Sanders running a bunch more routes in the No. 2 role was a weird use of the two backs’ respective skill sets. You have to like Chuba Hubbard a bit more but I’m honestly probably avoiding both where possible.
Steelers at Browns
Good projections will factor in the over/under; this one is down to a ridiculous 32.5. That said, extreme inputs can create volatility. I’m not saying to fade the 32.5, but if it’s wrong and there’s scoring in this game, there’s way more room to be wrong in a positive way. If the game is like 17-14 or worse, and still goes under, most of the negative outcomes are already baked into projections influenced by that 32.5 total. That’s a point that if you’re between two options that are close in a projection, you shouldn’t necessarily “double count” the bad game environment to break that tie.
Bears at Lions
Justin Fields is back! That’s good. So is Khalil Herbert, which complicates the Bears’ RB situation, and I’d probably try to avoid.
David Montgomery versus his old team. It wouldn’t surprise me if the workload shifted back his way. Wrote a little last week about how I don’t think this is settled, and it was probably closer to 50/50 than the end results suggested, though Jahmyr Gibbs definitely has the edge in the receiving game. They alternated series last week, almost exclusively, and Gibbs himself noted on a podcast that Monty was going to come in for a short-yardage play but asked Gibbs if he wanted it (which seems like a funny way for NFL usage to get decided, but I digress).