5 Plays in the NFL That All of Us Hate

There’s an ugliness in football right now that stinks more than Jeff Saturday’s jock. And no, I’m not talking about the Colts’ quest for 0-16, though that’s pretty interesting.

I hope Señor Irsay doesn’t feel like putting too much pressure on his team when Indy reaches 0-12 or 0-13. I hope that Irsay would at least win a game or two just so the team doesn’t feel the strain behind a 0-16 season. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

No, the real trouble in football are these ugly plays that keep popping up in NFL games.

Here’s a list of them, and why I like them about as far as I can throw them.

The Screen Pass

The screen pass is bland. It’s boring. It’s football’s neutral zone trap, its intentional walk, its four-corners offense.

You’d think a play where the rush would penetrate the offensive line only to avoid certain doom at the last possible second would be more exciting. It isn’t.

Maybe some of the new rules are to blame for that. Or maybe it’s just a boring play that never works.

The screen pass was borne more out of necessity than anything else. It’s also an effective way to get your skill players into space with the ball.

There’s a confidence that a play-caller has to have in his personnel to dial up a screen, especially in 3rd-and-medium and 3rd-and-long situations. He’s counting on his guy to make the first opponent miss, and sometimes the second as well.

There are side effects, if you will, to this bastardized ball-control blitz-beater.

Specifially, the screen pass is a stat-inflator. It pads the stats of quarterbacks that don’t really deserve it (I’m looking at you, Mark Sanchez).

It preserves the yards-per-carry averages of running backs between the tackles (What’s up, Fed Jackson?). And it adds “yards allowed” to defenses that really can’t be bothered with that sort of thing.

That is, unless your halfback gets laid out, like poor Reginald here.

The Touchback

What a downer the touchback is.

They’ve basically duplicated the ennui of the extra point, but without the goalpost.

And we’re seeing so many more of them this year. In 2010, more than 80 percent of kickoffs were run out. This year, it’s less than half.

The guy I really feel for is Ravens kicker Billy Cundiff, who was able to kick the ball in the end zone from his own 30. That was an advantage that he lost in the offseason because a group of old white people in a room decided that everyone should kick off from the 35. It’s disappointing.

The new kickoff rules aren’t awful.

Yes, teams kicking from their own 35 does generate an ungodly number of touchbacks, but the flipside of that is if you have to run for a post-touchdown pee, you have the extra point, a commercial break, the kickoff (where a touchback is increasingly likely), and another commercial break to get back to your seat before you really miss anything.

Cundiff had 40 touchbacks last year, which tied the NFL record.

I can almost guarantee two things. One, that this video will be the only time fans cheer for a touchback. And two, that Cundiff's record will get smashed this season.

The Timeout Right After a Commercial Break

A sure sign of a poorly-coached team is one that can’t get its offensive plays in after a timeout.

The issue comes from the play clock: instead of 40 seconds, the offense only has 25 seconds to snap the ball once the officials make the “ready for play” signal.

Regardless, after a normal commercial break, that’s almost two and a half minutes for a team to get its act together.

The 49ers were kings of this last year. I couldn’t watch them on TV without seeing them burn a timeout or incur a delay of game penalty after a commercial.

People want to talk about the big turnaround that the team is having under Jim Harbaugh, but a lot of that is because he stopped committing acts of idiocy like this one.

The Coach Calling Timeout Milliseconds Before a Game-Winning Field Goal Attempt

We’ve all seen this one before—in a close game when one team can win it with a last-second field goal, the line is set, the snap comes.

The kicker boots it through the uprights! It’s good!

Oh, wait, the other coach called timeout before anyone realized it. How annoying is that, to jump up and down and to marvel at an act of football heroics, only to realize that it didn’t count?

The defense’s old way of icing kickers was to just let the guy line up and then burn every remaining timeout they had left. Today, calling back-to-back timeouts is illegal.

Unfortunately, nobody told that to Joe Gibbs in 2007, and his attempt to ice Rian Lindell actually gave the kicker a hero opportunity 15 yards closer. Of course he made it.  

Fortunately, this play is almost extinct, and for good reason—it’s basically giving the kicker a free practice shot at the game-winner. It makes more sense now to just ice the guy as soon as everyone is set or sit back and let the moment overwhelm him.

That’s especially true in Pittsburgh, where the field is just mud painted green, like it’s St. Patrick’s Day or something.

The Quarterback Slide

I have less of an issue with the idea of this rule compared to how it’s actually enforced.

The rule is well-intended—if a quarterback runs out of the pocket and slides feet-first, he’s down and you can’t touch him.

Quarterbacks get obliterated a little less, and his team’s chances for success are preserved. I think everyone gets that.

The problem is that the spot of the ball is often skewed in favor of the offense, which shouldn’t be the case.

When the slide provision was originally written, the ball was to be spotted where the quarterback’s head was when he went down, as sort of a charge for taking that extra protection. But before this year, the league re-wrote the rule on when a player is declared down, and the runner is now getting full credit for the spot, and at the same time saying “Nyah nyah-nyah nyah nyah” to the defense. I find that bothersome.

The rule should be enforced the way it was originally written, and the league should make the runner earn that yardage.