The helmet rule is the best thing that has ever happened to NFL officials

The helmet rule is the best thing that has ever happened to NFL officials. The best thing ever.
 
You wouldn’t think so, since the rule is being universally savaged as a well-intentioned mess, as brought to you by the people who have patented and institutionalized the hot mess. You’d think that people will be throwing their remotes, their controllers, their phones, even their dogs in blue-hot rage at the continued de-footballization of football.
 
After all, we want the players to master the art of being blown up safely, which is why we may be the worst sports fans ever, but that’s another story for another day.
 
But what we know is this: the officials cannot adjudicate a rule that makes so little practical sense, and unlike the catch rule, the helmet rule goes to the heart of the game’s raison d’etre – men running into each other at high rates of speed for our beer-fueled amusement.
 
But every time such an event occurs in a game and a flag is thrown, fans and media alike will say, “Well, that’s wrong, but what’s an official supposed to do? He’s hopelessly screwed no matter what he does.”
 
This represents a sea change in fan reaction. At a time when officials are usually referred to as the emissaries of Satan and the tools of gamblers, this rule is already making observers shrug their shoulders and forgive the whistles for trying to adjudicate an unsafe game with a safety rule.
 
We have, you see, arrived at the tipping point for football, the day when fans have to decide whether they care about player safety, and whether they can muster the courage to say, “No, I don’t care that much  about player safety after all.”
 
And the instrument of that essential dilemma will be officials who have been given a rule so counter to historical football logic that fans will condemn not the interpreters of the rule but to the yobs who thought of it in the first place.
 
This is not to suggest that football players cannot learn a new kind of tackling, or that coaches can separate themselves from their inner Cro-Magnon and teach technique rather than violence. But the transition will be brutally difficult for the millions of fans who prefer football as demolition derby, and their fury will be real, and loud. 
 
It just won’t be pointed at officials because the experience of the catch rule showed us that the people who run the game are trying too hard to lawyer up the game by rendering the seemingly simple utterly incomprehensible, and that officials only get to call the rulebook they’re given.
 
So when you’re eatching this fall, you will hear this, a lot:
 
“That’s a terrible call! Of course, it’s a terrible rule, so what are you supposed to do?” Nobody’s going to say, “I certainly understand that gentleman’s plight, and feel badly for him and his conundrum,” but they will say, “Those damned suits” a lot more than “those damned stripes.” We’re not becoming more forgiving – we’re just shifting the target to a more appropriate setting.