The NFL released a list of rule proposals suggested by teams in advance to the annual Spring Meetings that will take place at West Palm Beach April 30.
Some of them make a lot of sense, such as the Steelers suggestion that teams be permitted to have one phone call or video conference with pending free agents during the league's two-day legal tampering period before free agency begins. Currently, teams are only permitted to speak with the agents of those players.
Others, however, are a little more radical, Detroit's proposal on seeding of the playoffs being chief among them.
Currently, the four division winners in each conference are seeded 1 through 4 based on record and tiebreakers, with the three wild card teams seeded in order of record and tiebreaks 5th through 7th.
Detroit has proposed that the conference seeding should be based solely on record, regardless of whether a team wins its division or not.
But the league has treated wild cards as such since it was first introduced in 1970, which began with one team earning a wild card berth.
The league has since expanded to four divisions in each conference in 2002, up from three prior to that. Before 2002, the league had just three divisions in each conference and three wild card teams also made the playoffs. But in 2020, the league decided to expand to allow a seventh team into the postseason, adding the third wild card back into the equation.
But simply seeding teams based on their overall record, divisions would become meaningless. The NFL might as well go back to its pre-1967 format in which there were two conferences and no divisions.
Of course, back then, there also were only 15 NFL teams and eight teams, including the Steelers, played in the East Division and seven teams played in the West Division, with the two champions meeting at the end of the season for the championship.
Green Bay, the West Division champion, beat East Champion Dallas – don't ask, the NFL has long had a problem determining East from West - for the NFL Championship, with the Packers then moving on to beat the AFL champion Chiefs in Super Bowl I.
The following season, the NFL split into four divisions, with three of the winners, Dallas, Cleveland and Green Bay, winning nine games. The Rams won the Coastal Division at 11-1-2, beating the Baltimore Colts – yes, I guess both are, technically, located on coasts – via tiebreaker for the title, as the Colts also finished 11-1-2, tied for the best record in the NFL.
The Colts, despite their gaudy record, which was better than the other three division winners, didn't even get a playoff spot.
And therein lies the rub. There are always going to be situations in which a second-place team from a division has a better record than that of at least one division champion. But that doesn't mean the divisional format should be tossed out.
The NFL doesn't play a balanced schedule, meaning Team A doesn't play the exact same schedule as Team B. Should Team A benefit because it plays in a weaker, less competitive division or has an easier overall schedule than Team B?
Right now, the NFL says no. Winning a division matters.
Think about the history of the Steelers. In the late 1970s, an argument could be made that the top two teams in AFC were the Steelers and Oilers. That made their division matchups in the regular season extremely meaningful, since it determined which team would potentially get to host the third meeting in the postseason.
The same thing goes for the Steelers and Ravens in the 2000s and even through today. Those two division rivals have met in the playoffs five times since 2001.
The regular season meetings often decide where that game will be played.
Under Detroit's proposal, those games would take on a lot less meaning if the seeding were simply based on overall record.
Why upset the applecart in terms of the meaning of the regular season games simply because a wild card with a better record happens to have to go on the road. If they don't want that to be the case, they can win their division, because in that case, the teams are largely playing a similar schedule.
Second-place teams will still gripe about it. But someone's always unhappy, likely starting with Colts fans back in 1967.
• The Packers have proposed making aiding a ball carrier illegal again, hence getting rid of the Eagles' "Brotherly Shove."
Other teams utilize this method of shoving a player who takes the center snap from behind, but none do it as well as the Eagles.
What the Packers are proposing also extends beyond helping the quarterback. It extends to aiding all runners, which also used to be illegal.
We'll see where that proposal goes, but it doesn't seem to have an overwhelming percentage of support.
The Lions have proposed the elimination of offenses getting an automatic first down for defensive holding or illegal contact penalties.
That could have some interesting unintended consequences if passed. While it stinks that the offense gets an automatic first down for a 5-yard penalty on, say, third-and-13, the reason for the rule is that some teams were coaching their players to be very grabby, feeling officials couldn't call them all.
I don't know that there will be a groundswell to change that rule, either.
• The Steelers reworked their secondary in a big way in the opening week of free agency, signing cornerbacks Darius Slay and Brandin Echols and safety Juan Thornhill. They also brought back cornerback James Pierre, one of their top gunners in punt coverage who also has plenty of experience in the defense.
The beauty of the deals are that of that group, only Slay is slated to be a starter, though Echols and Thornhill both have extensive backgrounds in the slot and could be in the mix starting there.
It's all about having options.
Yes, Slay is 34 years old. But he's a six-time Pro Bowl player – the most recent coming in 2023 – and was a key component of Philadelphia's Super Bowl run. Slay had an interception and five pass defenses in Philadelphia's four playoff wins. He's still a good player.
However, the Eagles selected two cornerbacks with their top two picks in last year's draft and need to get those guys on the field. Hence, Slay became expendable.
Echols, meanwhile, was stuck behind Sauce Gardner and D.J. Reed in New York, serving as the No. 3 cornerback behind what might have been the best starting duo in the NFL.
Despite that, he saw a good amount of playing time, including making four starts in 2024, and has been productive, picking off five passes in his four-year career, including two last season.
Thornhill replaces Damontae Kazee on the Steelers' roster. Kazee had been a valuable piece for the Steelers in his three seasons with the team, starting 14 games during that stretch.
But at 31, he was starting to slow down. In Thornhill, 29, the Steelers get a younger third option at safety and one better capable of playing either strong or free safety with the added capability of playing in the slot.
He joins a room that includes Minkah Fitzpatrick, DeShon Elliott, Miles Killebrew and promising second-year pro Ryan Watts, perhaps making it the deepest and most versatile safety room in the NFL.
And given the rigours of an NFL season, you can't have too much depth. The Steelers have that now on the back end of their defense.
• The NFL has clearly become a year-to-year league more so than ever before.
In the infancy of true free agency back in 1993, it wasn't all that strange to see even lesser-ranked free agents sign multi-year deals, many as long as four or even five years in length.
That continued throughout much of the free agency period.
But in recent years, most players are signing one-year deals, with a four-year deal becoming a rarity.
One week into the free agency period, which officially began Wednesday, just under 300 players had been signed to contracts.
• Dale Lolley is co-host of "SNR Drive" on Steelers Nation Radio. Subscribe to the podcast here: Apple Podcast | iHeart Podcast Pittonline@iheartmedia.com
Of those, just over half had signed one-year deals. Twenty-five percent had signed two-year deals, while 20 percent received three-year deals.
Just seven players in the opening salvo of free agency got a four-year deal, while one, guard Will Fries, reportedly got a five-year deal to leave the Colts for the Vikings.
It used to be that players who signed one-year deals were considered to be "betting on themselves," to have a good year or bounce back from injury.
But players and teams have figured out that it just makes more sense now to go year-to-year.
For the teams, it means you don't have to eat future money on your salary cap if things don't work out.
For the players, there's still the "bet-on-yourself," feeling. Have a good year, and you might get more money the next year. If not, sign another one-year deal somewhere else.
• The difference in contracts has become when teams sign their own players.
Those deals are often still at least four years in length, depending upon the age of the player.
That makes sense. The team knows the player. The player knows the team.
There's a comfort level involved.
And typically, the players who are signing new deals with their respective teams are star players or foundational pieces. They are players the team wants to have around for the long haul.
