The Hot Read: Handicapping The First Weekend Of The Newer, Softer NFL

If you believed the frantic discourse on TV and sports talk radio this week, you’d be convinced that, come Sunday, a bunch of exceedingly cautious helmetless, dress-clad men will take the field and engage in two-hand touch until someone scrapes their knee, at which point the NFL will disband and the storm troopers will march the streets and occupy our homes.

Okay, that’s a cartoonish and paranoid exaggeration, but the sense of foreboding has been palpable, whether it’s revealed in comments from casual fans, former players or current players. Even those who have kept their wits about them still don’t have a firm idea of what will be different about the games this weekend. In all likelihood, there won’t be wholesale changes to how teams go about their business on the gridiron, but as any sports fan knows, even subtle changes can carry huge ramifications and spur unfathomable rage from the masses.

That’s one good thing about being in the media: even if nothing is substantially different after a rule change (or new enforcement, to be exact) is announced, it can be controversial. Say nothing happens. Writers are free to speculate that about whether everyone overreacted or even whether the NFL was sincere about protecting its players.

So speculate I shall. What should we expect to happen? Hell if I know. But here are a few interesting scenarios along with odds on how likely I think they are to play out. A word of warning: All odds are for recreational purposes only and would regardless not be useful for prop bets as I completely and arbitrarily pulled them out of my ass.

The Average Points Scored Per Game Is Higher In Week 7 Than Any Other Week So Far This Season (10:1)

No one is envying pass defenses this week. Not that offensive coordinators are likely to call route after route that sends receivers over the middle where they are likely to get pummeled, but I don’t think it would surprise anyone if there are defensive backs that are a little more tentative about going after receivers, lest they be considered defenseless and subject the defender to a suspension. And as anyone knows, a defender playing tentative is usually a defender getting beat.

The Media Freaks Out Just As Hard About The New Enforcement Of Helmet Shots When A Player Suffers A Catastrophic Knee Injury (3:2)

This scenario, of course, assumes a very serious knee injury will occur this weekend. That’s possible whether helmet-to-helmet enforcement has been changed or not. But let’s assume that an offensive player goes down because they take a helmet to the knee. Or conversely, that a defender suffers a concussion because they take a knee to the helmet. Seeing as how this has been one of the chief concerns of players since the new emphasis was announced, the NFL would look incredibly foolish if the media pressure that forced them to take swift action against head shots suddenly began focusing on the unintended negative effects of that arguably knee-jerk action.

James Harrison Decides To Retire: (500:1)

Considering that he has already reported to Steelers practice on Thursday, I think it’s safe to conclude that there wasn’t much to his immature claim that he was considering leaving the NFL because he was fined $75,000 for knocking out Mohamed Massaquoi with a shot to the receiver’s head last Sunday. Then again, knowing the intellectual maturity that Harrison has shown at, really, any point in his career, you probably can’t entirely rule it out either.

The Result Of A Game Is Altered When A Key Defensive Player Is Ejected For A Helmet Shot (25:1)

This one is a little hard to quantify because it’s hard to measure how much a game would swing if a key player were removed from action at some juncture on Sunday, but it’s definitely one of those cases where everyone would know it when they saw. Say, for instance Haloti Ngata got ejected in the first quarter on Sunday and the Bills responded by running all over the Ravens en route to a victory. Okay, maybe that’s a little flawed because Buffalo still couldn’t beat Baltimore without Ngata, but you get my drift.

No One Actually Receives A Suspension: (8:1)

Probably the best case scenario to appease the doomsayers out there, unless the player who is suspended commits a cheap shot on par with Brandon Meriweather’s hit last week. Infractions far less serious than that would spur a lot of hand-wringing among NFL fans. If no one is suspended, there isn’t a rain storm of yellow flags and the scores aren’t wildly higher this weekend than they were before this year, then this cause celebre will have died out significantly by this time next week, having given way to the next huge NFL controversy of the week.