We’ve reached a point in the history of organized professional football that the officiating has attracted as much attention as the actual games themselves. This year, everyone’s main gripe seems to be roughing the passer calls.
The NFL’s roughing the passer rules, explained
How did we get to the point where the roughing the passer calls were this bad?
Photo by Julio Aguilar/Getty Images
There have been 24 roughing the passer calls through five weeks of the NFL season, according to NFL Penalties. That number is actually down from 48 roughing calls last season, but it feels like the calls this year have been egregiously bad.
Last week Falcons DT Grady Jarrett was called on a roughing the passer that looked like this:
We thought that would’ve been the worst roughing the passer call of the season, and yet ...
WOOF. It’s been a rough few days for NFL officiating when it comes to roughing the passer, but the timeline of how we got to the point where those are roughing calls is even more interesting.
What does the NFL rulebook say about roughing the passer?
A roughing the pass call is a 15-yard loss and an automatic first down for your opponent. Here’s a link to the league’s full explanation of how they call it. We would quote it here, but it’s 1,075 words long.
Roughing the passer was actually implemented in 1940, as the NFL became more of a passing league for entertainment purposes (stop me if you’ve heard that before). According to NFL Operations, along with roughing the passer even the ball was changed to a different shape to accommodate passing.
Then, the rule was changed in 2018, specifying that a defender cannot sack the QB and land on him with “all or most of his body weight”. You could tie this back to any certain hit that knocked a QB out of a game, but the true inflection point might have been when Packers QB Aaron Rodgers suffered a broken clavicle after being driven into the ground by then-Vikings LB Anthony Barr.
That’s how we reached this point, the point where defenders have to brace themselves while falling on a QB for a sack, because if they don’t it’ll be a flag. Even if they do it might be a flag. The NFL released a statement to ESPN saying that they would consider changes to the rule, but in light of Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa being injured, it could be considered a long shot.
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