By Michael Stets
ALLEN PARK–The NFL Spring Meeting took place in Chicago on Tuesday, and several new rule changes were approved by NFL team owners and put into place for the upcoming 2017 season.
Overtime has been shortened from 15 minutes down to 10 for the preseason and regular season. And the first roster cutdown from 90 to 75 players was eliminated, changing to just one cutdown from 90 to the final 53-man roster.
In addition to those two changes, the league will no longer be as strict on penalizing players for celebrations. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wrote a letter to the fans about the change saying the league is “relaxing rules on celebrations to allow players more room to have fun after they make big plays.” However, anything deemed offensive or delaying the game will still be penalized. Lastly, teams will now be allowed to have two injured players return off of injured reserve instead of only one.
Prior to Lions OTAs on Wednesday morning, Lions head coach Jim Caldwell weighed in on the new changes.
“Most of them just like anything else, I don’t spend a whole lot of time going through and lamenting over everything that I don’t necessarily like, but I do think there are a lot of good, healthy rules in there,” Caldwell said. “I think it helps us just in terms of the [roster] cut down of being a little bit later, instead of going from 90 to 75. That helps us particularly during the preseason. It gives us a chance to look at guys a little bit more, another ballgame under the belt. But then also I think it helps us from a player safety issue, too. Sometimes you get rather thin that time of year, so you’ll have a few more guys to still work with.
“The overtime rule is what it is. I think that’s fine. The other thing out there, I do think the celebration rule will be interesting. That part of it—the League is allowing them to do a few more things than they had previously, still with some sort of parameters. Certainly, they’ll provide a film for us to take a look at to show our players, to show what is acceptable and what’s unacceptable. I think you’ll see some pretty creative things out there. You give those guys a little time to get creative and they’ll come up with a few things.”
Is he a fan of the changes on celebrations?
“I’m an old-school guy,” he said. “Don’t make any mistake about that. It’s kind of the way of the world these days. Matter of fact, I’ll tell you how previous years how oblivious I am to some of those things that are going on. I was sitting down with my grandsons early on when they were very small and they were kind of going through the video games. And I watched the video games and the guy would make a tackle, or make a sack or whatever and he’d get up and–on the video game–he’s doing all these different sort of gyrations and all these different kind of things. He’s moving around and I’m saying, ‘That’s unrealistic. They don’t do that.’ And then I thought about it and I started just kind of watching after the play and it was true to life. Obviously, they do a lot of those things. I just think that’s kind of the way things are these days, so it’s fine.”
Wednesday was the second of the 10 scheduled days for the Lions’ OTAs this offseason, and first day open to the media.
“It’s obviously a lot of fun during this time of year. We get a chance to get out on the field and see what the new guys can do and how much the older guys have improved or are going to improve, so it’s a very important time. We have a lot of information to get them just in terms of schematics and some of the things, maybe getting adjusted or refining techniques and things of that nature, so it’s a great time right about now.”