Football is a dangerous sport. Tackling people and hitting them as hard as you can at full speed is bound to cause some injuries, but strict rules do their best to keep players safe. !e 2024 NFL o#season has been one of the most eventful seasons in recent memory. Seemingly league-altering free agency signings and trades have been taking place such as Saquon Barkley signing with division rival Philadelphia Eagles or Bu#alo Bills’ Stefon Diggs being traded to the Houston Texans. But what is going to change the game are two rule changes that were approved at league meetings this year in hopes of keeping players safer. !e banning of the hip drop tackle and a completely new kicko# format. You might be wondering, what is a hip-drop tackle? !e NFL states that a “hip-drop tackle occurs when a defender wraps up a ball carrier and rotates or swivels his hips, unweighting himself and dropping onto ball carrier’s legs during the tackle.” NFL owners have unanimously voted to ban this tackle to prevent injuries, as the tackle “causes lower extremity injuries at a rate 20 times higher than other tackles”. Banning the hip-drop tackle will undoubtedly improve player safety, but NFL players aren’t happy. Following the news of the rule change, 2021 Defensive Player of the Year T.J. Watt took to Twitter to satirically say “Attention all defensive players. When out there on the $eld. Try your best not to harm the o#ensive players. Even if you have to put their well being above your own.” Although Watt is obviously joking, there is truth to his tweet, as this new rule among many other rules on tackling in recent years has made de- fense exponentially more di%cult. “Banning the hip-drop tackle would make it nearly impossible to tackle quarter- backs because there are too many rules in place to protect them,” says Drew Huneycutt ‘24, a senior football player at Friends. Overall the hip-drop tackle being banned will help o#ensive player safety, but will come at the cost of NFL defensive players being outraged. In the past few years, fans of the NFL have noticed that the role of Kicko#s have been diminished in the modern game. While watching a game there may only be two or three times a game that a team returns a kick rather than taking a touchback. !is is for two simple reasons: the ball is almost always kicked in the endzone and returns from so far rarely make it past the 25-yard line (where a touchback would place the ball), and kick- o#s are dangerous. Kicko#s have been proven to be the most dangerous play in football in terms of high-speed collisions causing concussions. To solve these issues the NFL has adopted the XFL’s (merged with the USFL and is now the UFL) kicko# style. !e new changes will place the kicking team and return team’s lines of players 5 to 10 yards apart with the kicking team on the 40 and the return team between the 35 and 30 yard lines respectively. Neither the kicking team nor the returning team’s lines will be allowed to move until the ball either touches the ground or is caught by a returner. !is change would lower the speed of the players, as the distance traveled by players would be only 5 to 10 yards before contact rather than 15 or more yards, meaning players won’t get up to as high speeds before contact. !ese two NFL rules may completely change the course of games, and there is no doubt that teams will be forced to adapt and play di#erently because of them. Whether these changes are good or bad can’t be known for sure, only time will tell. !e only thing that we know for sure is that these changes will change football inde$- nitely.