Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews has been Lamar Jackson’s favorite target for a number of years, but Jackson lost his best guy early in Baltimore’s Thursday night game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
With 11:05 left in the first quarter, Andrews caught a pass from Jackson, and was tackled at the Cincinnati four-yard line by linebacker Logan Wilson. The method used was the hip-drop tackle, which has been on the NFL’s mind for a while now.
hip drop tackle claims another pic.twitter.com/4to3Pw2AbL
— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) November 17, 2023
Andrews was subsequently ruled out of the game after going to the locker room for X-rays.
#Ravens TE Mark Andrews has been ruled out of the game with an ankle injury from a hip-drop tackle.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) November 17, 2023
At the mid-October league meetings, league executive Jeff Miller said that the league was thinking of banning the hip-drop tackle — in part because studies have shown a 25% increase in injuries.
“It is an unforgiving behavior and one that we need to try to define and get out of the game,” Miller said, via the Associated Press. “To quantify it for you, we see an injury more or less every week in the regular season on the hip-drop.”
Competition Committee chairman Rich McKay said that the hip drop is a close cousin of the horse-collar tackle, which was banned by the league years ago.
“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 said.
“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.”
In the end, as McKay said, the decision was made to see how things went in the 2023 season before making any more moves against the tactic.
“Last year, we did talk about it a lot. There were enough teams to say it’s one year, let’s see it and leave it alone. So we did, and I’m sure it’ll be back again. But I just don’t want to get in the business of predicting because I really don’t know what the outcome will be. I do know it will be talked about.”
It will certainly be talked about now.
