The NFL is considering the worst rule change of all time

There’s nothing worse than a bad penalty or missed call ruining a critical game — ask Bills fans. However, a plan the NFL is floating is somehow a million times worse, could functionally ruin the game, and raise questions about the legitimacy of the league itself.

NFL officials are floating the idea of expanding the role of the replay official even further in 2026, this time encompassing missed non-football penalties on the field, which the replay official would then be able to call like a video-assisted on-field referee. It’s unclear whether or not the replay official would have the final say, or if the head referee would make the call — but either way it would mark a profound change to how football games operate.

Troy Vincent, the NFL executive vice president of football operations, said that

“You don’t want to just be expanding the Pandora’s box, but we believe that things like the non-football act, you can really, really restrict what that is,” Vincent said, via ESPN.com. “That’s something that we believe that potentially there’s a little bit of tweaking in the language, that may be the first step.”

The idea is that if the replay official saw a punch, stomp, or any other action outside of football that the referees miss, they could immediately assess a penalty. As it stands, the league does have a mechanism for punishment outside of games, typically resulting in fines or suspension — but up to this point, there hasn’t been an iron-clad way to assess a penalty during the game in which it occurred.

Naturally, there are mammoth problems with this. Once more, the NFL is introducing another subjective penalty to the mix, but this time coming from someone removed entirely from the on-field action. They don’t have a way to monitor the ebb and flow of the game, they don’t know what has been said between officials and players prior, while adding to seemingly endless theories that the NFL is rigged. Just imagine a scenario where there’s a critical third down in a playoff game, the defense gets a stop, then before the offense punts a call comes in from New York that there was a shove to the face away from the play, which is deemed a “non-football action.” The offense is given a first down as a result, and it completely changes the game.

That’s a hyperbolized scenario, but not outside the realm of possibility under these new guidelines. Furthermore, the expanded use of replay officials in 2025 was a bit of a mess, often with the replay official either taking too long to make a determination, or making an obviously wrong call.

As frustrating as it can be to have a missed call, the idea of using replay officials to enforce missed calls is even worse. Every degree of complication added to officiating is a pain point, and it’s a matter of time before we have a game decided by something dumb like this. The mechanism for missed non-football penalties works fine: A suspension after the fact on a warranted transgression works, and non-football penalties that are missed by the officials likely didn’t have an outcome on the play — which is why they were missed.

Trying to change the game for seemingly no reason is ridiculous.