The NFL has adopted the NCAA rules for touchbacks and fair catches on kickoffs, and former NFL special teams legend Pat McAfee isn’t a fan in the slightest of the changes.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell lobbied team owners this week to vote again on the rule changes, which would bring the ball on any fair catch or touchback on kicking plays out to the 25 yard line.

On his show Tuesday, McAfee called the efforts by Goodell “bush league.”

“Hey Rog, come on. You’re my commissioner. You’re our commissioner,” he said Tuesday on his YouTube show. “This is a bullshit commissioner move.”

Pat pointed out that for a good majority of the time, the new rule won’t have much of a bearing on games, as most kickoffs nowadays result in a touchback. But McAfee added that there’s a good chance this is going to come back to bite the league a little bit because it eliminates an element of strategy in the game.

“But at some game where it’s gonna be windy and cold, and games are gonna matter, this is gonna happen,” he said. “And everybody watching is gonna go, ‘This is the most bullshit thing I’ve ever seen in a professional football game.'”

Part of the rationale of the decision to make the rule change is to help prevent any future litigation from former players against the NFL for long-term effects of head injuries. McAfee said it was evident that was the main reason.

“It’s all just covering your ass for future problems,” he said. “I would like to see these stats that they keep saying are so prevalent and endearing to saving lives and brains that the kickoff and the punt are the only two that it happens.”

“We can’t just make the game so f–king fake and bullshit that it kind of disrepects the league as a whole,” McAfee added. “It’s always like a protect the shield thing.”

Pat went on to say that his success as a punter and kicker has contributed to the evolution of special teams play in the NFL. He really doesn’t like the fact that the changes ultimately makes special teams less valuable to the game.

“It’s a real f–king play, though,” he said. “And there’s real strategy and there’s real things to be gained from that.”

“You’re just taking away another chess move, and I don’t understand why you would want to dumb the game down,” McAfee added.

Rick Hummel has passed away after a brief illness. The legendary baseball journalist was 77 years old.

Hummel is best known for his work covering the Cardinals for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His death comes in the first season after announcing his retirement.

Covering the team was something of a dream come true for the St. Louis native. He reported on three World Series wins and seven National League pennants. He was recognized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

The 2022 season was Hummel’s last of a 51-year run covering the team for the Post-Dispatch. It wasn’t the end of his career though. He went to Jupiter, FL in February to cover spring training as a free lance writer for a number of different outlets.

Rick Hummel will certainly be missed by his friends and loved ones. He will also be missed by the Cardinals community, who already mourned the loss of Mike Shannon earlier this month.

While we know that Pablo Torre is going to have a new show with Meadowlark Media in the future, he hasn’t exactly been specific as to what it will be. We continue to look for bits and pieces from Torre about his show that will begin sometime before the NFL season begins. 

Torre was a guest on The Rights To Ricky Sanchez: The Sixers Podcast with Spike Eskin and Michael Levin (around the 22 minute mark) and he said that he is at Meadowlark to follow his curiosities and he thinks back to the story he wrote for ESPN The Magazine in 2015 about the 76ers and trust the process serves as a guide to him.

“I have things I am obsessed with that I want to explain to people, and I believe there are stories in sports and in the national cultural conversation that either could use a little more smarts or a little more humor and I want to figure out how I can be the place where you find smart and funny when it comes to storytelling in sports in a narratively informed way. I’m being very vague about it, but the magazine sensibility of that process story is something that serves as a North Star in my brain.

“How do I tell a story that people from afar are maybe somewhat familiar with, but can get under the hood of to articulate and reveal and report some things that serve as something close to a definitive treatment to it?”

One thing that Torre thinks is a big opportunity in the media landscape is that there is an open lane to tell sports stories in the audio format. 

“There’s a lot of narrative series, some of which are excellent, but in terms of an always-on show where someone’s job is to follow a curiosity down the rabbit hole and/or tell a story/interviewing a person as a way of explaining something larger. I want to bring a viewpoint that because sports is so much about living or dying with these games as we have been, I want to take the position of also being able to zoom way in and way out and engage with the news cycle, but not be beholden to it.”

Torre isn’t going to be able to cover everything in sports, but he said that he wants to take a complicated story and make it simpler for the listeners.

“My goal is not that I’m going to cover everything, but I’m going to give you stories of a different genre, stories that explain and go deeper. I want to make this fun, but also premised on contextualizing complicated stories in a simpler way.”