Quarterbacks are still football players

Football is evolving, mostly for the better, but the NFL seems to be forgetting that quarterbacks are still football players.

First and foremost, all football players are human beings, so of course a priority should be keeping them safe as best they can.

Having said that, football is a contact sport. From players to people who know very little about football, most know that football involves hitting.

The NFL, as it is now, needs to take just a few steps backwards to where it was. In trying to protect players, they went too far and are officially overprotecting one specific position: the quarterback.

Quarterbacks in the NFL have almost become perceived as a fine China doll: don’t touch it or it might break. What seems to have been forgotten is that a quarterback is still very much a football player.

To go even further, a quarterback is the offensive leader on the field, often a field general and the person who runs the offense mid drive. We don’t often look back at great leaders and see them as weaklings: Leonidas of Sparta, Alexander the Great, George Washington, George Patton, etc. We don’t see these leaders as wimps, and I’m positive that they weren’t treated as such in their time.

Now I’m by no means saying that NFL quarterbacks are or should be considered on the same level as great military leaders; that would be asinine. But in their field, they are the equivalent of a general, yet they are being treated like pampered prima donnas.

It’s not as if these men were forced into playing football for a living. Some of them have college degrees, and all of them have the choice to do anything else. Sure many of them may have been encouraged by friends and family growing up to play, but these are not 15 year-old boys. These are 20+ year old men who are fully capable of walking away if they think the sport is too violent.

For the sake of clarification, here is the new rule in its entirety from the official NFL rulebook:

“A rushing defender is prohibited from committing such intimidating and punishing acts as “stuffing” a passer into the ground or unnecessarily wrestling or driving him down after the passer has thrown the ball, even if the rusher makes his initial contact with the passer within the one-step limitation provided for in (a) above. When tackling a passer who is in a defenseless posture (e.g., during or just after throwing a pass), a defensive player must not unnecessarily or violently throw him down or land on top of him with all or most of the defender’s weight. Instead, the defensive player must strive to wrap up the passer with the defensive player’s arms and not land on the passer with all or most of his body weight.”

The rule is so specific that it almost makes it impossible to touch the quarterback without getting a flag.

NFL quarterbacks themselves, such as Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson have been critical of the new rule; with the latter saying, “let’s just play football.”

I could not agree more with Watson. The new rule is making it virtually impossible for defenders who are rushing the quarterback to do their job. Literally for some of them, such as defensive linemen and defensive ends, that’s almost their entire job: to sack the quarterback.

It would be one thing if the rule was consistent with all positions within the NFL, but that’s hardly the case. I would argue that there is a situation in football where a player is much more defenseless than a quarterback who’s just thrown the ball: wide receivers who run directly across the middle of the field, jump up really high to catch the ball and WHAM, are smacked hard in the midsection with their hands above their heads.

You’ve probably seen the types of plays I’m referring to. Sometimes a receiver will be hit so hard in the legs that he’ll flip in the air. Sometimes receivers will even hesitate and not go up high to catch a ball for fear of getting taken out. It’s one reason quarterbacks try not to throw too high, “forcing” the receiver to expose himself by jumping to get the ball, especially when they’re running a crossing route.

So why are receivers not protected from defenders in this scenario? Is it because they’re less important individual players?

No.

Is it because they’re usually bigger guys than quarterbacks?

Maybe.

It probably has something to do with being less common than a quarterback getting hit. But again, there are entire positions in the game of football that are molded around the objective of sacking the quarterback.

It’s almost like a race where there are 10 runners, but because one of the 10 is a decorated and respected runner, they give him a 10 second head start. That would never happen; it’s absurd and would be blatant cheating.

Quarterbacks aren’t special outside of the fact that they’re typically the ones who run the offense on the field.

Besides that one stipulation, they are still football players.

Where this rule change isn’t blatant cheating, it is most certainly twisting and shuffling the rules of football around to overprotect one position and put other positions at a clear disadvantage. It is completely unfair and is a dangerous precedent to set in a game that many have a strong passion for supporting and playing.