SmashMouth

Dan Hanzus of NFL.com reported in March that the owners had passed the proposal to ban the formation. It seems it now has been officially written into the rule book.

In the NFL, an offense has to have five players on the field who are ineligible to catch a pass. These five players are usually offensive lineman and they usually are stacked in the middle of the field to protect the quarterback.

In the AFC divisional playoff against the Baltimore Ravens, the Patriots ran three-straight plays where they stacked four ineligible receivers in the middle of the field, with a fifth eligible receiver next to them to look like a blocker. They put their fifth ineligible player further along the line of scrimmage to make him look like a receiver.





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