How to Stop Holding in the NFL

Could eliminating the sport's most frustrating call mean games could be fixed less easily?

There’s nothing worse when you’re watching a football game than having a touchdown called back because an offensive lineman was called for holding on the play.

Holding is a regular source of frustration for many fans because it appears to occur on most every down, and the whistling of it appears to be quite arbitrary and enforced at inopportune times. It’s as if the officials just feel the need to remind everyone they can call it every once in a while. They’re also probably fixing the games, so there’s that too.

The vast majority of holding calls are on offensive linemen and most of those calls are because a lineman grabbed a defensive player by his jersey or arms in order to impede his progress.

The thing that has not been acknowledged in the hundred-year history of football is that offensive linemen almost never need to be able to grab anything for any purpose besides holding, and this poses a problem because holding is ubiquitous. Linemen aren’t eligible receivers or runners. They almost never pick up loose fumbles. All they need to be able to use their hands for is sticking them out to block people.

The obvious solution is to eliminate the possibility that they can grab anything at all.

To stop holding calls from interfering with the flow of the game, all the NFL needs to do is requite every offensive lineman to tape their hands closed or wear some type of glove that binds their hands into little mitts. A webbed glove that severely limits dexterity is another possibility.

This will have almost zero impact on the spirit of the game or change it in any way, outside of less holding calls.

The only possible complication is that about once every two seasons an offensive lineman is able to pick up a fumble and amble his fat ass up the field for about nine yards and it would be harder to pick up the ball with his hands bound shut.

That’s a trade-off most fans would be willing to accept. Of course this rule could disadvantage the most skilled linemen who have perfected the subtle art of getting away with holding on nearly every play.

That in itself is acknowledging the inherent flaw. Has football reached a place where it is accepted that a certain rule is constantly broken, yet only rarely called as a penalty?

If so it shows an openness toward the game being manipulated. Maybe to keep the scores close for ratings purposes, maybe to shave a few points off the spread, maybe to give an advantage to the big market teams.

Whatever the possibilities, taping the linemen’s hands together is an easy fix, and deciding to not implement this fix means that those in charge of these decisions have decided it’s better that the game of football not be a level playing field.

This is what many of us have suspected all along.