Fans do not like the NFL’s new helmet rule

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across the NFL powered by SurveyMonkey. Each week, we send 32 polls to 100+ plugged in fans from each team.

The NFL loves to shoot itself in the foot. Whether it’s 32 owners frightened by and overreacting to a certain someone’s Twitter feed or suspending players with no evidence of wrongdoing, the league never met an unforced error it couldn’t embrace.

It happens every spring when owners get together and pass new rules. Remember all those years of trying to figure out exactly what it meant to catch a football? This year, we finally, maybe, got that settled with a rare appearance by common sense, only to trip up all over again this spring with the well-intentioned, vaguely defined rule stipulating what players could and couldn’t do with their helmet.

Refs threw flag after flag for it during the preseason, sometimes for hits that clearly have to be eliminated from the game and sometimes for hits that looked just like a regular tackle. It was the biggest story of the exhibition season.

Players were especially vocal about the rule. Apparently, a lot of fans share their opinion. According to SB Nation FanPulse, a national survey of fans across the NFL, 48 percent of fans think that the new helmet rule is the league’s worst. And it’s not even close.

That’s out of sample size of more than 2,500 respondents collected from readers at all 32 of our network’s team brands. Obviously, that’s a more plugged in group than your average viewer. It’s not scientific, but it does offer some insight into how fans feel about the new rule, one with a huge gray area that the league and officials have struggled to define.

We did get more clarification, finally, on the helmet rule late last month when it said in a statement that inadvertent or incidental contact with the helmet and/or facemask is not a violation. And, as retired NFL lineman Geoff Schwartz pointed out, it’s reasonable to expect that it will take officials and everyone else to get into a consistent pattern for calling the foul.

None of this should overlook the fact that it’s essential for the NFL to do whatever they can to make the game as safe as possible. Football isn’t a game of violence, it’s a game of skill and nuance ... that’s what makes it exciting, not players getting clobbered and having years shaved off the end of their life.

Still, it’s obvious fans are going to be slow to give the league the benefit of the doubt, at least until the new rule becomes more routine in its application. Let’s not forget too that, for fans, whatever rule that costs your team 5, 10 or 15 yards is always the worst rule at the time.