This is definitely a conspiracy theory, but it really makes sense when one remembers Nick Saban's tendency to be less than honest (i.e. lying about his permanency with his current coaching position).
Last year when there was a potential Oregon v. Bama championship game in the future (before Oregon's loss to Stanford) Nick Saban made comments about the safety ramifications the no huddle/fast tempo offenses could have.
I think that the way people are going no-huddle right now, that at some point in time, we should look at how fast we allow the game to go in terms of player safety. The team gets in the same formation group, you can’t substitute defensive players, you go on a 14-, 16-, 18-play drive and they’re snapping the ball as fast as you can go and you look out there and all your players are walking around and can’t even get lined up. That’s when guys have a much greater chance of getting hurt when they’re not ready to play.
Some saw this as him doing some petitioning for future rule changes in the off season to try to get the game back to the style he likes to play.
But in light of Urlacher's admission that his Chicago Bears defense had a dive guy to get injured when they needed a break I think Saban was being sneakier than just starting to voice concern to possibly change the rules in the future.
I think he was putting it in the public's mind that no huddle offenses = more injury, so don't be surprised when our defense has more frequent injuries thus slowing down an up tempo offense. He was effectively changing the potential conversation from focusing on whether defenders were faking injuries to whether there is a safety issue and starting with the premise that the injuries are legitimate and there was no faking.
I know there is no way to prove this, just an interesting thought I had when reading about Urlacher's statement.
I'm giving Saban props for thinking that far in advance to preemptively steer the conversation away from the topic of faking injuries or players taking a dive.
This is definitely a conspiracy theory, but it really makes sense when one remembers Nick Saban's tendency to be less than honest (i.e. lying about his permanency with his current coaching position).
He is a genius.
Wut
Player safety? That argument is stupid. The real argument, and the one people want to try to avoid as to not make them look like pussies and/or whiners, is that this changes the way you build a defense, scheme a defense and the overall expectations of defense at any level. We may just have to accept that offense has gotten to be so sophisticated and rules are becoming so strict, that offense has simply evolved to dominate the sport. Instead of just an era of offensive dominance, there has become a paradigm shift that has actually changed the entire sport.