Shout out to Bo Wulf for asking about the Tyler Steen penalty from Sunday’s Eagles game. The second-year lineman was flagged for unnecessary roughness when he came into a scrum “late” and tried to push the pile forward. I put “late” in quotation marks because I swear that the official was already pulling out the flag before the contact was made, when the whistle was slow to begin with. But the way Nick Sirianni explains it, the flag didn’t have anything to do with the whistle at all (my emphasis in bold) –

Q: I don’t mean to get you in trouble here. The G/T Tyler Steen penalty after the whistle, if somebody had the opinion that maybe the referee should have blown that whistle earlier, and that was the real reason for that happening, would somebody be onto something?(Bo Wulf)

NICK SIRIANNI: I went in there (this week) and talked through that and reestablished what the rule is there. One thing we really pride ourselves on is those extra yards we get when we push the pile. So, you preach everyone running to the football and everyone hustling to the football.

So if anything happens, like the ball comes out on the ground, they’re there for that. But also, to be able to push the pile and get the extra yards. And you saw it against the Giants last week, where Saquon had the ball and was probably stopped at about the two yard line, but everyone got behind him and pushed the pile into the end zone. We scored a touchdown off of it.

That’s happened a bunch. We talk about that a lot. And our guys play so hard, and their effort is what it is. We have benefits because of our guys and the way they play and how hard they play.

So now, the rule is that if I’m right behind you, I can get in there and push. But if I’m building up a head of steam and putting my back into the pile, that’s what they don’t want.

So, I get why they called that. I know why they called that. I know why Tyler was trying to get up there and push them further because we praise that.

To be honest with you, sometimes you’re like, ‘Do you want them to blow the whistle?’ It’s sometimes yes, sometimes no. I didn’t want them to blow the whistle in the Giants game because we were able to push the pile forward to get the touchdown.

Had I’ve been able to tell we were going to get a penalty for that, I would rather them blow the whistle there.

The way Sirianni explains it, you can’t build up a “head of steam” before pushing the pile, which would mean the timing of the whistle is irrelevant. I guess if Steen is less forceful getting up to the scrum and/or comes in with less momentum, then it probably wouldn’t have been called.

Looking through the rulebook, there doesn’t seem to be anything explicit about offensive linemen running into piles and pushing them forward, but I did pull these generic bullet points from the “unnecessary roughness” section:

  • running, diving into, or throwing the body against or on a runner whose forward progress has been stopped, who has slid or taken a knee, or who has declared himself down by going to the ground untouched and has made no attempt to advance.
  • unnecessarily running into, diving into, or throwing the body against or on a player who (1) is out of the play or (2) should not have reasonably anticipated such contact by an opponent, before or after the ball is dead;

The basic, catch-all explanation is that Steen used excessive force on the play. Alright. It’s sort of like the play that got DeVonta Smith injured earlier in the year, but reversed, where in one instance a defensive player is barreling towards a player whose progress is obviously stopped, and in the other an offensive player is coming in with too much force. Regardless of how it’s written in the rulebook, you could have avoided both sequences if the plays were blown dead earlier. Maybe Steen throttles down if the refs were quicker to decide that Saquon Barkley’s momentum had been stopped. And maybe DeVonta isn’t concussed if the Zebras figured out that a 170-pound guy certainly wasn’t picking up more yardage.