NFL Owners Approve Automatic Ejections, Touchbacks Moving Up To 25-Yard Line
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- A day after the NFL announced that all chop blocks would be illegal, the league is making two very significant rule changes.
The first: Touchbacks will no longer come out to the 20-yard line. Instead, drives will start at the 25-yard line.
Secondly, owners approved the proposal that will result in automatic ejections for any player who gets penalized twice in the same game with unsportsmanlike conduct penalties.
As NFL Network's Albert Breer noted, the changes will be put into place for this season and then re-evaluated next offseason. That's the same process through which the PAT move to the 15-yard line went last year, and that rule change was made permanent this week.
The touchback rule change is, presumably, an effort to increase offense -- albeit in as artificial a way as possible. Theoretically, starting a drive five yards farther up the field does give a team a better chance of getting in field-goal range. But, when you consider that only a little more than 50 percent of kicks go for touchbacks, and when you factor in all of the uncontrollable events that play out during any given drive, it's unlikely that the impact will be major.
The automatic ejection rule is seemingly a reaction to the somewhat ugly scene in the Panthers-Giants game last December, when Odell Beckham Jr. went after the head of Panthers cornerback Josh Norman. That, plus the league's eternal quest to "promote player safety," made this rule change happen.
