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NFL commissioner Roger Goodell sent a memo to teams last week, reminding them the league is “minimizing contact to the head and neck, especially where a defenseless player is involved.”
Colts president: TV replays show ‘snapshot,’ not ‘whole spectrum’
“If you aim for the bottom of the numbers, the odds are,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], in 99 percent of the cases, you’re going to be fine. When you have egregious examples, such as we saw in the Baltimore-New England game, those need to be penalized. It has to change, but everybody knew that coming into (this season).”
To help “emphasize the importance [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] of teaching safe and controlled techniques, and of playing within the rules,” Goodell wrote, there will be enhanced discipline, including suspensions, for those who violate the mandates.
“(Tennessee’s) Jeff Fisher, who is a great coach [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] and an expert on defensive-backfield play and (overall) defense, pointed out in March that all you have to do is change your aiming point,” Polian said.
The proliferation of broadcasted highlights has [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] made the hits seem more rampant than they actually are, Polian said.
While the NFL’s reinforcement of the rules seemed a reaction to a series of gruesome hits last Sunday, some of them, like the one doled out [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] by Pittsburgh’s James Harrison on Cleveland’s Joshua Cribbs, were ultimately deemed legal.
Polian sees few illegal hits
Justin A. Cohn | The Journal Gazette
“The world has changed in your business,” he said. “You get a snapshot, which people presume is the entire spectrum, and it really isn’t.”
The Colts have two of the hardest hitters in football – linebacker Clint Session and safety [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] – but team president Bill Polian doesn’t want or expect them to change the way they play.
“We were very clear when we made these changes this past March,” he said, “that hard hits were still going to be in the game. What we wanted to do was prevent the targeting of the head and neck areas for defenseless players.”

“I watch three to four games, per week, on tape. My answer (is), ‘No, I’ve seen a decrease,’ ” Polian said. “But the (recent) publicized hits have gotten a lot of publicity. I think overall, particularly defensive backs have changed their [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] approach. They’ve been aiming lower and realizing that these points of emphasis have existed. That’ll be the case going forward.”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said.
And Polian said he hasn’t seen an increase in the number of illegal hits this season.
As a member of the NFL’s competition committee, Polian was involved in the rules changes made in March, which dictated a defensive player must give a receiver time to protect himself before he is hit high. What the league was trying to avoid were the helmet-to-helmet hits on defenseless players, like the one New England’s Brandon Meriweather doled out to Baltimore’s Todd Heap last week.
So Polian still expects the Colts (4-2) to hit, and hit [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] hard, when they resume play Nov. 1 against Houston (4-2).