Do a dance, touchdown celebrations are back
After years of stamping out touchdown celebrations, the NFL is bringing the party back to the end zone
There never was a mandate, those who made the NFL’s rules over the years recall, to suck the joy out of whatever Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson or Joe Horn might do to punctuate a touchdown.
There was no single incident that was the catalyst, as they remember it, and there was no particular person or team campaigning to keep such things as drably buttoneddown as possible.
The NFL never set out to be the No Fun League. It just happened that way, at least when it came to the sport’s illegal-celebration rules for its players.
When commissioner Roger Goodell announced in May the NFL would relax those rules — making things such as using the football as a prop, going to the ground to celebrate (as with a snow angel) and group demonstrations permissible, it represented an abrupt and remarkable aboutface for a league that spent years tightening such standards. The effect of that shift in philosophy will become evident soon, with the preseason and regular season nearing.
Were those decades-long efforts misguided? That determination cannot be made until the success of the new approach can be measured. But some of those involved in the process say they merely had been trying to do the right thing.
“A lot of it was about getting feedback from the colleges about how the pros influenced the college players,” said a former member of the NFL’s rule-making competition committee, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide frank assessments of past internal deliberations. “It was about sportsmanship. It was about having class, if you will. We felt like NFL players were the role models for players everywhere at all levels. But it was a constantly moving target. It was always easier to say what you couldn’t do than what you could do.”
The enduring images are of Owens, while a member of the San Francisco 49ers, standing on the Cowboys star on the 50-yard line in Dallas or pulling a Sharpie from his sock to autograph a posttouchdown football or Horn pulling a stashed cellphone out of the goalpost padding or Johnson using a goal-line pylon to putt a football. But none of those, taken alone, represented a watershed moment for the tone-it-down movement, the former competition committee member said recently.
“I don’t remember any one thing that pushed it along,” he said. “It was an accumulation of things. It was all of those things together. I wouldn’t say there was a defining moment. It wasn’t any one team saying they had a problem with so-and-so.”
Going back further, however, a 1984 NFL prohibition on “overly demonstrative acts by players” is remembered by some as the reaction of former Cowboys executive Tex Schramm, the longtime chairman of the competition committee, to the Fun Bunch group-celebration touchdown gyrations of the Washington Redskins.
One former NFL executive, who also spoke anonymously to provide blunt assessments of past discussions, called the early celebration restrictions under former commissioner Pete Rozelle and the Schramm-led competition committee “partly in response” to the Redskins and the Fun Bunch.
The former competition committee member was more adamant about the connection, saying: “Now, if you go back to the Fun Bunch, that was Tex Schramm. That was clearly one team against another. But after that, I don’t know if that was ever the case.”
Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice-president of football operations, has seen the issue from all sides. He is a former NFL defensive back who played from 1992 to 2006. He served as president of the NFL Players Association.
Vincent said in his experiences over the years, neither side — not players and not management — spoke with a single voice on the topic. It all depended on your perspective: Were you the player or team who scored a touchdown, or the one that gave one up?
“I’m showing my age,” Vincent said in a recent phone interview. “I came into the league in ’92. The Oilers still had (Ernest) Givins. It was coming off that generation of White Shoes (wide receiver Billy Johnson). You saw the Fun Bunch on the highlights growing up. Players became more creative. Serving as a (union) rep and as president, there were times where we as players said, ‘This is a grey area. This might be going overboard a little bit.’ But then other guys said, ‘Why can’t the ball be a prop? What’s wrong with taking a (pretend) picture?’ A guy would say, ‘I worked all week to make that play. Why can’t I celebrate?’
“The players wanted a line of professionalism. Defensive players would say, ‘Don’t point a finger at me. Don’t point the ball at me.’ The offensive players said, ‘It’s up to him to stop me, then.’ You don’t ever want the officials to have to be involved, trying to figure out what’s excessive. Over time, you get (input from) the players, the coaches, the officials. You add language, and it becomes more restrictive.”
In the era of Owens, the key issue became inciting an opponent.
“You would think about Terrell and you would say: You do this for a living. You (score touchdowns) multiple times a weekend. More than anyone, you should be Mr. I’m Gonna Be Here Again,” Vincent said. “You stand on the star and you’ve disrespected every guy on that (Cowboys) sideline. It’s always trying to find that balance. That’s what it’s always been. You want to appease the fans, the referees, the players, the coaches, the owners. You get everybody’s input. That’s what we tried to do.”
Yet even if it wasn’t personal against Owens or anyone else, NFL traditionalists spent decades continuing to wag fingers when it came to players’ celebrations so often deemed excessive. The tipping point, it seems, came last season, when the NFL officials cracked down even further.
That was part of a Goodell-led push toward improved sportsmanship in the aftermath of the ugly series of on-field confrontations between cornerback Josh Norman, then with the Carolina Panthers, and New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. during a game late in the 2015 season.
The illegal-celebration flags were flying early last season, and players and fans alike seemed baffled. Redskins tight end Vernon Davis was penalized for a modest celebration in which he flipped the football over the goalpost like a basketball jumpshot.
“I think there was a feeling last year that we’d gone too far,” a highranking official with one NFL team said earlier this off-season.
It was Goodell who reeled things in. He sought the opinions of current and former players. He took the lead on the issue. He said at the annual league meeting in March in Phoenix that he wanted to take a little longer to make sure things were done correctly, with additional input by players. Last month, while the owners met in Chicago, Goodell outlined the new plan in a letter to fans.
“It came after a lot of discussions with our players, our coaches and our officials, our clubs and the fans,” he said at the conclusion of that owners’ meeting. “We saw a lot of interest in liberalizing and allowing the players a little more freedom to be able to express their joy, their individuality and, frankly, celebrate the game. So that’s what we think we’ve accomplished here. There will be an ongoing dialogue with a lot of parties to make sure that we implement it.”
Finding a balance is what the league tried to do this year, Vincent said.
“When the (competition) committee got together in February and we went through the cut-up on unsportsmanlike conduct penalties, we went around the room and asked everyone: Foul or no foul? People were split,” Vincent said. “There was no consensus — that said, we’ve got to take a look at this.
“Then we met with the players at the (NFL scouting) combine and we did the same thing. And the same thing happened. You’d say, ‘Why is that a foul?’ And someone would say, ‘Well, he pointed.’ So you begin to think you have to make some adjustments. You have the fans saying, ‘Why can’t they celebrate?’ And we said to the players if there were three or four things (to be legalized), what would they be? It was: ‘Why can’t I use the ball as a prop? Let me celebrate on the ground. Why can’t we work on it together (with a group celebration)?’ And you say, ‘What is wrong with that?’ That’s how we got there.”
The NFL isn’t done policing celebrations. Those that are prolonged or offensive and those directed at an opponent remain illegal, the league says. It will be interesting to see during the upcoming season what the standard applied by the on-field officials will be.
“There’s always the subjective,” Vincent said. “We don’t want the officials sitting there counting: ‘One thousand one, one thousand two.’ It’s about the flow of the game. We want to remove the officials from making those subjective calls. We need to stay on top of it and keep talking about it.”
It was about sportsmanship. It was about having class, if you will … But it was a constantly moving target. It was always easier to say what you couldn’t do than what you could do.