For many teams, the 2012 season "officially" started at the recent kickoff of OTAs. But few jobs are actually secured during the Spring. Take the headlines hyping your favorite team's rookie as a superstar in shorts for what they are worth. They aren't news, they are speculation.
Leave it to the annual owners meetings to provide us with some good, clean and factual football conversation fodder.
We'll go through the big three items of note and then, we can discuss their validity.
The owners have voted to make the wearing of knee and thigh pads mandatory starting at the beginning of the 2013 season. The players' union could oppose the measure but at this time no indication has been made that they intend to appeal.
Several NFL players on both sides of the ball have opted to forgo the leg protection in recent years, WRs and CBs in particular.
The owners also approved a measure that designated a "marquee" player on each roster's IR. Said player can return to game action after his team has played their eighth game. He can resume practicing in preparation for the team's seventh game.
Lastly, the trading deadline is no longer week 6 and will now be week 8.
Do these new measures make sense? For the most part, yes they do. Pads increase player safety and will prevent injury. Players will stay fresher longer. That's a good thing.
The trade deadline should be at the midway point. That just makes sense. Even if it didn't, it isn't a huge move.
But, IR is IR. Injured Reserve forces you to park a player for the entire season, which can lead to some high drama when a player is slated to miss 8-10 weeks. Do you hold a spot for him so he can contribute during a playoff run? Would that leave you too weak at another position? The weighing of these options is part of the game. It enhances the drama that is the NFL season.
Now let's be fair. Teams can only activate one player off IR per season. The rest of the walking wounded are banished until the following year once they get slapped with the IR label.
Obviously this is beneficial for the NFL. Star power late in the season had become a bit of a growing concern. In recent years, more and more players have succumbed to serious injury earlier in the campaign. The result is less marquee names to promote December and playoff matches with.
Theoretically, the league will have 32 more worthwhile players to depend on come crunch time.
That in itself is not a bad thing. But it does, once again, take a bit of intrigue out of the game. It directly affects the PUP list which serves as a temporary reserve list. Players on that list must return to action by week 9 or they have to be removed from the 53 man roster by either IR or release.
The marquee player can avoid such time constraints and return just in time for the postseason if need be without eating up a valuable roster spot until he can actually contribute
.Overall, these changes are not unwelcome. But brace yourselves. Rumors are swirling that kickoffs may no longer be a part of the game before 2015.
