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Rules experts disagree on Quinton Coples penalty

coples

Jets linebacker Quinton Coples drilled Chargers running back Donald Brown with a hard hit on Sunday that knocked Brown’s helmet off.

It was a vicious play that merited a 15-yard penalty.

No, wait: It was a clean tackle that shouldn’t have been a penalty.

Actually, it was a great demonstration of how confusing the NFL’s rules are.

When Coples hit Brown, it looked brutal. But sometimes a linebacker’s hit on a running back is supposed to look brutal. And it wasn’t clear why the officials working the game flagged Coples for unnecessary roughness: Brown wasn’t defensless and Coples didn’t grab his facemask or horse-collar him. So plenty of Jets fans -- or just fans of physical defensive football -- took to Twitter to complain about the call.

Former head of officiating Mike Pereira, now a FOX analyst, got plenty of those tweets and didn’t understand the controversy. To Pereira, it was a clear penalty.

“All of you asking about NYJ unnecessary roughness - why are you disagreeing? Clothesline to the head. What’s the issue?” Pereira wrote.

But then former NFL referee Mike Carey said on Inside the NFL that it was clean and shouldn’t have been flagged.

“It would be better if we didn’t have a flag on that because there’s not something illegal about that,” Carey said. “He grabbed him around the shoulder and he slides up with his forearm and the helmet comes off. Maybe his chin strap [was loose]. It was not illegal but from a distance it looks like somebody grabs a facemask.”

The issue here isn’t about whether Pereira or Carey is right, it’s about why the NFL rules are so confusing that even a former head of officiating and a former Super Bowl referee can look at the same play and come to different conclusions about whether it’s a 15-yard penalty or just good football. The NFL needs to do a better job of clarifying the rules so that everyone knows what’s a penalty and what isn’t. Right now, no one knows. Not even America’s two most prominent NFL rules experts.