Hip-Drop Populism: Why the NFLPA is Opposing a Player Safety Rule
On the benefits of a hip-drop ban, the power of the fans, and the players union's new PR strategy
At the NFL’s annual meeting in late March, the league owners unanimously passed a rule outlawing the swivel hip-drop tackle.
The league defined the swivel hip-drop as a technique where:
A Defensive player grabs a ball-carrier from behind with both arms
That defensive player unweights himself and swivels his lower body across the runner
The defensive player lands on and traps the runner’s legs below the knee
If “swiveling” and “unweighting” is a little abstract (it was for me), check out this guide for spotting hip-drops from the National Rugby League, who banned the technique in 2023 (the NFL is yet to release their own video that I can embed).
The swivel hip-drop, which we’ll henceforth call the hip-drop (although there is a slight distinction*), has caused a number of serious injuries. In 2020, a hip-drop was responsible for Dak Prescott’s season-ending compound ankle fracture. In the 2023 playoffs, a hip-drop hobbled Patrick Mahomes, while another broke Tony Pollard’s left tibia. In week 11 of the 2024 season, a swivel hip-drop from Logan Wilson broke Ravens star tight end Mark Andrews’ fibula. Andrews’ injury was the nail in the coffin for the hip-drop - the owners quickly approved a proposal from the competition committee to ban the technique, eager to save their own stars from a similar fate.
The ban brought strong criticism from some fans and ex-players. Former star defensive lineman J.J. Watt characterized the frustration by comparing the post-hip-drop NFL to flag football. Former linebacker A.J Hawk asserted that every tackle he made in his 11 seasons was a hip-drop as Pat McAfee, clad in his signature tanktop, speculated on the wider conspiracy that the ban is a ploy to increase scoring and boost TV ratings.
Safety-related rule changes being met with hostility from football traditionalists is nothing new. When pressure from Theodore Roosevelt led the NFL to introduce the forward pass after 19 college football players died playing the game in the 1905 season, coaches at then-powerhouses like Harvard, Yale, and Army bemoaned the “sissification” of the game. Over 100 years later, when the league moved to reduce traumatic brain injuries by introducing targeting penalties, cornerback Josh Norman told a reporter, “I pray for the game and hope it’ll still be what it is, but it seems in our day and age, the game as we know it is coming to an end.”
While we can write off some of the criticisms of the hip-drop ban to ex-players and traditionalist fans who have an aversion to change, or who hold a perception that the league favors offense over defense, the hip-drop ban has also faced a more surprising source of criticism: the NFL Players’ Association, who condemned the ban shortly after it was announced by the owners. If it feels strange for the players’ union to oppose a change intended to make their constituents safer, well, it is. But as we look at the likely effects of a hip-drop ban, both on and off the field, we see that what seems like irrational opposition from the NFLPA may actually be part of a larger strategy - and one that has already started to bear fruit.
Why a Hip-Drop Ban is Likely to Succeed
NFL competition committee chairman Rich McKay calls the hip-drop the “cousin” of the horse-collar tackle. McKay’s comparison is an apt one. Mechanically, the horse-collar and hip-drop leave ball-carriers in a very similar position, knees buckling and ankles snapping under the weight of defenders. The ensuing injuries from both tackles also share a similar, devastating profile. In the 2004 season, all-pro receivers Terrell Owens and Steve Smith Sr. suffered broken legs from horse-collars not unlike the injuries the hip-drop dealt Tony Pollard, Dak Prescott, and Mark Andrews.
The two techniques are also similar in that they were rarely used, and therefor not engrained behaviors. Critics of the hip-drop ban have argued that the tackle has always been part of the game and that defenders, when approaching at certain angles, have no other way to bring down ball carriers. Using the data compiled by the NFL, however, we can quickly dismiss that claim. The league only found 230 instances of the tackle across the 2023 NFL season, or just under once a game. The league also noted the technique was used 65% more in 2023 than in 2022. That increase is a big concern, given that the league found 15 of those 230 tackles (6%) caused an injury that resulted in a missed game. The league estimates that makes the hip-drop 25x more dangerous than the average tackle.
The league didn’t compile the number of horse-collar tackles in the lead-up to its ban, as they did with the hip-drop, but we know they weren’t very common. In fact, of the six injury-causing horse-collar tackles in 2004, four were executed by the same guy, Cowboys safety Roy Williams.
The owners removed the horse-collar after that 2004 season when Williams was still one of the only guys using it, and the ban was an unqualified success. Since the league began enforcing horse-collar penalties in 2005, not a single player has missed a game due to an injury from a horse-collar tackle. The technique is now virtually extinct, with only 23 horse-collars identified across the 2023 regular season.
The owners hope to reproduce that success with a hip-drop ban. The horse-collar ban showed that 15-yard penalties and post-game fines are great at cutting back fads like the hip-drop - and the hip-drop is a fad. Defenders, especially smaller ones like defensive backs, began using the technique more in recent years because it was an effective way to get ball carriers to the ground: just sling your weight onto the back of their knees. Unfortunately, the same reason the hip-drop was so effective is what also makes it unacceptably dangerous.
However, nowhere in their statement opposing the ban does the NFLPA dispute that a hip-drop ban will reduce injuries. What the players’ union has identified is a way to benefit not only from the rule change, but also from the backlash that’s likely to follow.
The Power of the Fan
To understand how the players intend to do that, consider the incredibly profitable partnership between the owners and the NFLPA. The owners provide the infrastructure, such as stadiums, staff, etc., and the NFLPA provides the labor: the players. Together, they produce the NFL season, which they sell in multi-billion dollar deals with ABC, CBS, NBC, and now Amazon.
The owners and players engage in collective bargaining to divide the $20B in revenue they bring in each year. Up for negotiation in collective bargaining is the revenue split (currently 48% for players to 52% for owners), post-retirement benefits, adding games, and much more. The collective bargaining agreement (CBA) gets renewed every ten years, but the negotiations are perpetual, with both sides focused on one thing: getting a bigger slice of the NFL’s revenue pie.
But while there are only two parties fighting for revenue, the NFL business model has a crucial third partner: the fan. While the owners provide the infrastructure, and the players provide the labor, the fans provide the attention, and that attention is what makes the money. The TV providers pay billions for the rights to NFL games only because they attract more fans than any other programming. In 2023, 93 of the top 100 TV broadcasts were NFL games, making them prime real estate for advertisers.
Fans have tremendous leverage because they control the league’s revenue. Whenever the owners or the players propose a change, it is always with the fan in mind - namely, whether a change will bring more fans and generate more revenue. But over the last few years, the NFLPA has also begun to leverage the fans' power to get a bigger slice of the NFL pie at the owners' expense.
The NFLPA’s PR Playbook
In 2023, the NFLPA launched their popular NFL Team Report Cards initiative. The union sent anonymous surveys to all the players, asking them to grade different aspects of their franchise, from facilities to front office staff and everything in between. These surveys dug up some surprisingly unsavory stories, from the rats in Jacksonville’s locker room to the Bengals not shelling out for family seating to seemingly everything about Washington.
One of the NFLPA’s goals behind the report cards is to inform their players of the best places to play. If you aren’t into rats, you might have second thoughts when Jacksonville offers you a contract in free agency. The larger goal of the NFLPA was to apply pressure to the owners to improve the working conditions at each of their franchises. Informing the players is one way to apply that pressure, but the NFLPA didn’t stop there. The union also released the report cards online for the public. In addition to the 2,000 NFL players, the NFLPA enlisted millions of NFL fans to apply pressure on the owners as well.
Leveraging fans quickly paid dividends for the players. After ranking in the bottom half of franchises in the 2023 survey, Falcons owner Arthur Blank told his front office he “never wants to appear on that report again with the ranking that we got.” Consequently, Blank announced facility improvements and fired an unpopular strength and conditioning coach. Other teams across the league made similar improvements after their grades were released: showers were fixed, team meals were provided, and box seats were set aside for families. These changes have not only provided improved conditions for players, but validation for a new PR playbook. The NFLPA successfully used the power of public opinion to move money from the owners to the players.
Leveraging the Hip-Drop
The NFLPA’s opposition to the hip-drop ban is straight out of that PR playbook. This time, instead of highlighting thrifty owners, they are appealing to fans’ resentment around rule changes.
Over the past few seasons, rule changes meant to reduce injuries have faced widespread backlash. The most contentious of these were penalties that limited how defensive players could hit the quarterback. Economically, the changes were sound: quarterbacks are the biggest draw for fans, and, therefore, the biggest money-makers for the league. Protecting them by discouraging certain techniques - like the low hit that injured Brady in 2008 and the body slam that broke Rodgers’ collar bone in 2017 - were quick fixes with big upside: Keeping the stars on the field to keep the fans watching and revenue growing.
The poor implementation of the rule changes made those benefits harder to see. Officials struggled to execute the rule changes on the field, which led to an endless stream of benign tackles being penalized. As Clay Matthews and Chris Jones had innocuous 10-yard sacks turned into 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalties, the fans grew to resent the new penalties.
There was also the problem of how the costs and benefits of these rule changes presented themselves. In theory, fans would balance the value of stars being injured less often with the cost of the annoying penalties that enforce rule changes. In practice, however, the tangible, persistent penalty flags began to carry much more weight than the more abstract benefit of shifting the injury curve for players to the left. Although his statement was petty and sensational, J.J. Watt’s quip about the league descending into flag football does tap into a truth about the NFL fans: they don’t tune in to watch the game played safely.
The upshot of the owners making safety changes that they believe generate more money in the long run and fans resenting the short-term costs of those changes was an opening for the NFLPA to steal leverage from the owners.
The NFLPA started making their move a year ago. In 2023, the players’ association made a bold move to distance themselves from any potential rule changes by refusing to send a representative to the competition committee. In a statement explaining their reasoning, the players hit all the notes fans would be looking for: They argued they lacked control because the players’ union only got one vote on the committee, and even accused the owners of using the NFLPA as “cover” in the past when passing unpopular rule changes.
In their 2024 statement, after the hip-drop ban went through, the NFLPA continued to hammer home the fan-centric rhetoric:
This move from the NFLPA differs from the player survey in that it doesn’t come with a specific ask attached. Distancing themselves from unpopular rule changes moves the potential bad press squarely to the owners, but the degree to which the NFLPA can monetize that is yet to be seen. It’s also fair to wonder how widely the NFLPA can exploit this strategy. While no members have criticized the NFLPA for taking this stance on the hip-drop, there is probably a point where the NFLPA taking anti-safety stances could damage their credibility with the players.
The effectiveness of this PR move from the NFLPA also likely has the attention of owners, who are unlikely to sit by and let the NFLPA take free swings at them in the media if they prove damaging in future negotiations. In this case of the hip-drop, however, the NFLPA has found a win-win. Not only will the players benefit from a safer NFL, but by leaning into fan outrage, the NFLPA might win even more benefits from the ban going forward.
Edited Excellently by Greta Gruber
*The swivel hip-drop is a specific variation of the hip-drop where the defender lands on the back of the runners legs. Hip-drop tackles where the defender lands on the ground first are not covered by the NFL’s new rule.
Really enjoyed this! As a fan, I think I resorted to that "ugh" feeling when I heard that the hip-drop was banned, but I had no idea how rare it actually is. It's wild, because even though I didn't (and don't) have a very strong opinion on it, I feel like I still fell on one side of the fence without even realizing. I don't want to say it's the NFLPA at work, but I do think that the prevailing narrative among fans is one of disagreement, and that definitely suits their ends. Either way, I had no idea how complicated the whole thing really is, so thanks for shining a light on it!
This is such a tough rule change. Stuff like this makes the league harder to watch for me because it just adds more power of referees to the game, and that’s just not fun.
I can’t write about baseball right now, but in my eyes it’s near perfect because an umpire can’t affect the game (most of the time) the way a referee can. Super Bowls and high stakes playoffs have been won because of referee calls rather than the actual playing of the actual game.
I find it all utterly infuriating LOL