A horrific week for the Washington Commanders somehow got worse on Monday night with the news that star linebacker Frankie Luvu will serve a one game suspension for his third violation of the NFL’s hip drop tackle rule. He’s the first player to be suspended under the 2025 point of emphasis, and the suspension has raised a lot of questions about whether the league is going too far to police in the game in the effort to prevent injuries of all kinds.
Luvu’s tackle in question came against the Seahawks on Sunday Night Football. He’s in No. 4 in the below clip.
Don’t worry if you’re watching this confused how it’s an illegal play, because a lot of people are extremely confused by what seems to be an innocuous play. The fundamentals of a hip drop tackle are on in which a defender grabs his opponent, and then uses his own body weight to bring the ball carrier down, rather than the force of the tackle itself. This is defined in the NFL rulebook as:
ARTICLE 18. HIP-DROP TACKLES
It is a foul if a player uses the following technique to bring a runner to the ground:
Penalty: For a hip-drop tackle: Loss of 15 yards and an automatic first down.
There is no question that Luvu has used the hip drop tackle in the past (which we’ll look at in a moment), but this tackle against the Seahawks is a very suspect example of the rules. The spirit of the hip drop tackle is that a player is on their feet when they grab hold of a ball carrier and then use the leverage of dropping their hips to drag the opponent down. We can see in freeze-frame that Luvu was airborne, trying to make a diving tackle when he first made contact with the Seahawks player.
There is fundamentally no way to make a diving tackle which doesn’t involve using your body weight to bring down an opponent, outside of an ankle tap. The rule against hop drop tackling was to decrease the extreme propensity for lower body injuries as a result of the play, which is fine — but this was not a hip drop tackle by the letter of the rules.
Most likely the suspension came because Luvu has twice been warned about hip drop tackling, and on other occasions he’s definitely breached the rules.
Luvu will appeal the suspension, which should cause it to be overturned. Even if the NFL ends up getting it right, the over-policing of hip drop tackles in this way is ridiculous. It adds another layer of subjectivity into a referee’s arsenal, and we already have too many subjective plays in the NFL.
What’s you take on the hip drop tackle?
