I’ve covered a lot of football games in my career and can’t remember any season where I’ve heard as much complaining about penalty flags as this one. To hear some folks tell it, referees are throwing so many flags in high school games this year (always mostly against their teams) that they could block out the sun if it were daytime. It’s “ruining the game” every week.
Based on what I’ve seen this year at games I’ve attended, the only difference is the scapegoat.
Are the refs really making an effort to throw more flags for fun’s sake? Probably not. But with the NFL adopting a more aggressive stance against offensive holding in 2019, we’ve already seen a massive uptick in flags thrown at the pro level (in the first two weeks of 2019 alone, per ESPN, there was a 66 percent increase from the 2018 season). Could the NFL’s eagerness to crack down on offensive holding have trickled down to the high school level? It’s possible.
It does slow the game down quite a bit and that can be annoying when you’re trying to watch either side get into a rhythm and play an entertaining game. But it’s also true that if you were to take a few cameras and get good angles of every snap in any game at any level, you’ll find at least one offensive lineman holding a defensive player. They could call it more often than they do now and, while everyone would get sick to death of the game, it would at least be justifiable.
The NFHS did make several rule changes for this high school football season that directly make it easier for refs to throw the flag. This information can also be viewed online at NFHS.org:
REDEFINED REQUIREMENTS FOR A LEGAL SCRIMMAGE FORMATION
(2-14-1, 7-2-5a)
Rationale: A legal scrimmage formation now requires at least five offensive players on their line of scrimmage with no more than four backs. This change will make it easier to identify legal and illegal offensive formations.
PROHIBITION ON TRIPPING THE RUNNER
[2-45, 9-4-3o (NEW), 9-4-3o PENALTY (NEW)]
Rationale: In an effort to decrease risk, tripping the runner is now prohibited. It is now a foul to intentionally use the lower leg or foot to obstruct a runner below the knees.
HORSE-COLLAR TACKLE ADDITION
(9-4-3k)
Rationale: Grabbing the name plate area of the jersey of the runner, directly below the back collar, and pulling the runner to the ground is now an illegal personal contact foul.
I personally haven’t seen referees make many of these calls when I’ve worked a game this year, though. The big one in my experience really has been offensive holding. It does feel like there have been more penalties on the whole called this year than in the last season or two, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see at the end of the year that there really was some kind of increase. But I don’t know if there’s really been a major increase at this level or if the specter of a conspiracy exists in my mind because so many people have complained about it that part of my brain trained itself to light up with “what if?” questions when I see one in the air.
There is one surefire way to reduce the number of penalties called: to stop committing them. It’s much easier to say “stop doing that” than it is to actually get high school football players to stop doing that in a week’s time. You could just stop calling certain penalties like offensive holding that aren’t as crucial to player safety, but then everyone will be just as frustrated when their teams are playing defense and can’t do anything. Then you’ll want the penalties to come back.
I do have an idea in the middle. Instead of increasing or decreasing the frequency of those calls, what about looking at what does constitute offensive holding and changing it? Would it hurt to look at what a hold is now and tweak it to give players a little more leeway, but not too much?
This is something that always happens at every level and hasn’t been called this frequently until now. It’s just like with this year’s NFHS rule changes: tweak the penalty so that, in order to be called, it has to be even more obvious to anyone watching a game and even more of a hindrance on the player who’s getting held.