NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell addresses legalized gambling, officiating, player safety ahead of Super Bowl LVIII – NFL.com

Goodell also discussed continued efforts to improve health and safety. The NFL prioritized adjusting kickoff rules to make the play safer as it went into the 2023 season. The league saw a significant drop in the number of regular-season games missed to injury this season, but concussion numbers essentially remained stable (219 total, compared to 213 in 2022), which is below the recent high of 281 a few seasons ago. Goodell hopes to find ways to improve those numbers while also keeping the kickoff in the game.

"For me, I thought this rule was necessary for the one year because we need to innovate," Goodell said. "We need to work with our coaches and our competition committee and those across the league to find a way to keep the kickoff in the game. It's an exciting play. It's important for us. The same for punts. But when you see a higher injury rate for that play, you can't ignore that. And we haven't yet found that solution. I think we've proven over the last several years, you can make the game safer and more exciting at the same time. And that's our objective here. I'm confident we'll get to that. It's going to take a little work. This is a one-year rule, so I hope that will be a major focus this spring."

NFL playing surfaces, specifically the differences between grass and artificial-turf fields, have also become a hotly debated topic when it comes to player safety. Goodell hopes to explore a new innovation as a potential option, while asserting that finding consistency for players on a week-to-week basis is a crucial element of keeping them safe.

"This has been a major focus with the Players Association, and we have jointly worked with experts to try to study this question," Goodell said. "It's not always just grass or synthetic. We think hybrid is something to really explore. That's actually what they use in international soccer, is a hybrid type of format. Additionally, I think we've got to look at different circumstances, right? You play in a dome for four and half months, that's pretty hard to grow grass. You can sometimes take it in and out. You can find a way of trying to replace that. But we want to try to get the best possible field surfaces, and that is something that varies from market to market, climate to climate. One of the the things that we think is very important and the studies that we're doing, is consistency. And when I say consistency, it's not just on the entire playing surface, but it's consistency of what players are playing on during the week leading up to the game. What they're practicing on and what they play on. That consistency is really important, according to our engineers and our experts. So we're looking at that with the Players Association and hope we can find better solutions and continue that focus."

When asked about reports of the 49ers being displeased with their practice field for this week in Las Vegas, Goodell said that the UNLV practice facility was approved unanimously.

"That work is being done every single day," he said. "We had 23 experts out there. We had the union out there. All of them think that's a very playable surface. It's softer than what they have practiced on, but that happens. It's well within all of our testing standards. It's something that we think all our experts, as well as neutral field inspectors, have all said unanimously that it's a playable field."

Lastly, Goodell made an exciting announcement for the 2024 season: The Philadelphia Eagles are the designated team for the league's first-ever game in South America. Philly's contest in So Paulo, Brazil, will take place on Friday of Week 1, with the Eagles playing an opponent that will be revealed before the full 2024 regular-season schedule is released in the spring.

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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell addresses legalized gambling, officiating, player safety ahead of Super Bowl LVIII - NFL.com