Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

JohnH19 wrote:I don’t like when the horse collar penalty is called on a play where the ball carrier was in no danger of being injured by the tackle. I think there should be some judgment on the official’s part involved with making the call but I feel that way about a lot of ticky tacky safety rules.

I feel this way about facemasks now all being 15-yards I liked the idea of a 5-yard version and a 15-yard version.

I was officiating a High School Football game in 2007 when a runner broke free down the sideline. About 40 yards downfield he was caught from behind and pulled down by a horse collar tackle causing his lower leg to break. It sounded like a firecracker going off followed by a loud scream. The player, a 15 year old sophomore suffered a compound fracture and never played this great game again. It took until 2009 for the NFHS to outlaw the Horsecollar, four years after the NFL did. I'm all for hard hitting and tough football but the horse collar tackle is dirty and cowardly.

The injury that results from a horse-collar tackle is from full body weight being leveraged down, which transfers the torque to a runner's joints, ligaments, and bones in their legs. Over time, players have become larger, which also contributes to the increase in injury prevalence. We also have more sophisticated medical study that draws the correlation to that action. I don't think that there should be a judgement call on whether a tackle is particularly injurious, as the action doesn't have to be significant to cause injury. There are exceptions, such as a pocket-bound passer, because body parts are not going in different direction like an open-field runner would. As for the comparison to a face mask penalty, the incidental face mask (5 yard) foul was for contact to the face mask. That went away, but what qualified as a 15-yard penalty never changed; there wasn't two tiers of the severity of a pull/grasp of the face mask, all were 15.

I had to bring this post back up after last nights game. Watson for GB was probably going to score a TD after a long catch and run before Marcus Peters makes a horse-collar tackle for the Raiders to save the TD. Of course, he is called for the penalty but it only gains three additional yards for GB as a half-the-distance penalty.
The Raiders defense led by Crosby, holds them to a FG, where the Pack leads 13-10 instead of 17-10. The Raiders end up winning 17-13 after a later TD and HC McDaniels praised Peters for the heads-up penalty.

Mike Florio today, feels what McDaniels did, was not advocating player safety and suggested the League may view this penalty close to the goalline as a future TD based on the rulebooks' definition of "a palpably unfair act". Whether the rules committee makes that future determination or not remains to be seen, whatever, but Peters made the right play saving a TD ...

This rule like Nick stated, is an overreaction and should be made more of a judgement call, rather than a clear penalty because it had been a legal tackle for over 70 years before the strength and timing of Roy William's tackles, forced the horse collar to be outlawed*. We have to have better safety, yes, in todays' game but you cant allow all the violence to be outlawed or you will have a game that resorts to flag football, which is now being allowed ... for the OLYMPIC GAMES ... a sign of the NFL future?

*Edited

In recent memory, I most vividly recall the play where Devin White tore Jameis Winston's ACL on a horse collar. Didn't take more than that for me to see why it's banned. It's glaringly obvious how something like that or a broken leg could result from the way the player is pulled downward. Jersey grabs and other similar appearance tackles pull the player more to the side, putting less pressure on the currently planted leg.