April 25 Update: NFL owners have now approved this, banning hip drop tackles.
After a rash of injuries in the NFL during the 2004 season, the horse-collar tackle was banned, resulting in a 15-yard penalty, and now there's a new type of tackle of major concern being evaluated for the same fate.
High profile receivers Terrell Owens and Steve Smith Jr. (both of whom suffered broken legs) were among the notable injuries during that 2004 season caused by horse-collar tackles, and college football adopted the rule in 2008 followed by the National Federation of High Schools (NFHS) in 2009.
The latest issue in the crosshairs of the NFL are hip-drop tackles, a "close cousin" of the horse-collar tackle according to chairman of the NFL competition committee Rich McKay.
What exactly is the hip-drop tackle?
"What's happening on the hip-drop is the defender is encircling tackling the runner and then swinging their weight and falling on the side of their leg, which is their ankle or their knee," McKay shared, via NFL.com.
"When they use that tactic, you can see why they do, because it can be a smaller man against a bigger man and they're trying to get that person down because that's the object of the game. But when they do it, the runner becomes defenseless. They can't kick their way out from under. And that's the problem. That's where the injury occurs. You see the ankle get trapped underneath the weight of the defender."
According to the NFL, hip-drop tackles have a 25x injury risk compared to normal tackles, and Patrick Mahomes and Tony Pollard are two prime examples of premier players that were injured in the playoffs last year at the hands of hip-drop tackles.
"It's an unforgiving behavior and one we need to try to define and get it out of the game," NFL Executive Jeff Miller shared.
"To quantify it for you, we see an injury more or less every week in the regular season on the hip-drop."
This past off season there was some discussions about forbidding hip-drop tackles, but the NFLPA opposed the idea, and a proposal to ban the type of tackle was never introduced.
After watching his quarterback escape major injury after a hip-drop tackle that trapped Geno Smith's feet under him Monday Night, Pete Carroll pounded the table to get the tackle out of the game altogether.
"We’ve just got to get that out of ball. It’s so dangerous," Carroll shared on Seattle Sports 710.
One demographic that won't be pleased to see another type of tackle banned - coaches and players on the defensive side of the ball, who will again need to find a way to fight tackling instincts to bring a ball carrier to the ground in a safer way.
Based on both targeting and horse-collar tackles starting in the NFL before trickling down to college and high school rulebooks, this could be something we see being implemented on Fridays and Saturdays in the fall soon.
We were unable to include the hip-drop tackle that took down Geno Smith due to NFL copyright restrictions, but here's a look at an example of a hip-drop tackle from a Memphis vs. Utah State game for some context.