'I think you can be consistent': How NFL refs decide who gets ejected (or not) for head hits

New Orleans Saints receiver Chris Olave takes a hit to the head so hard that it causes a concussion and renders him motionless. The man who delivered the blow, Carolina Panthers safety Xavier Woods, is penalized 15 yards for unnecessary roughness.

About an hour later, Buffalo Bills receiver Keon Coleman absorbs a hit to the head from Miami Dolphins safety Jordan Poyer, who incurs the same penalty as Woods.

A few hours after that, Detroit Lions safety Brian Branch is penalized for similar contact on Green Bay Packers receiver Bo Melton. Branch, however, is not only penalized but ejected from the game.

Here were three hits to the head and neck area of defenseless receivers, all clear violations of NFL rules and all within a few hours of each other Sunday during the league’s Week 9 schedule. All three incurred flags, and will almost certainly lead to fines, but only one led to an ejection.

The circumstances raised an obvious question: Why was Branch ejected while Woods and Poyer remained in their respective games? And, for that matter, why was Los Angeles Rams receiver Puka Nacua ejected for throwing a punch Sunday, an act that seemingly goes unpunished as often as it results in discipline?

The answers lie in whether on-field officials and/or league executives, all of whom are authorized to issue ejections, judge the act to be “flagrant.” The NFL rulebook defines flagrant as “extremely objectionable, conspicuous, unnecessary, avoidable, or gratuitous” and makes clear that intent or apparent malice is irrelevant.

In reality, said NFL officiating rules analyst Walt Anderson, “there’s no one element that is a magic pill, so to speak, because you take a lot of things into account.”

The Branch and Nacua ejections brought the leaguewide total to nine this season, maintaining a pace that would match the league’s annual average over the past decade (19).

Anderson and former NFL officiating chief Dean Blandino told ESPN the league’s ethos has long been to limit disqualifications to the most serious of offenses, given the relatively small number of games in an NFL season compared to other sports. For that reason, executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent makes the final decision (typically from New York) on all ejections, Anderson said.

When determining whether an illegal hit merits an ejection, Anderson said, the league largely looks at whether the contact was avoidable or if there was any effort made to moderate it.

“How many steps does the player take?” Anderson said. “What’s he doing with his head? Is he working to get his head out of the way, as an example, and maybe just make contact with the shoulder? Or does he lower that head in a posture where he’s using the helmet, if you will, more as a weapon, as opposed to maybe just trying to run through the player?

“You often take a look at, ‘Did the player have time to at least make some adjustments to help mitigate the of contact that occurred?'”

The NFL judged that Branch did not make that effort.

“It’s when you take several steps, then you lower the head, make forcible contact helmet to helmet without really any effort to get that head out of the way,” Anderson said. “That’s far more flagrant than just simply a bang-bang play where you’re trying to get your head to the side, but you can’t get everything to the side and you end up hitting somebody [in the head] with the shoulder.

“There were a couple of calls that were made in some of the other games where they were definitely fouls, but they were more fouls in just the competitive nature of football being a hard-contact sport.”

For his part, Branch said he understood his “target was obviously high” and “moving forward, I do have to move my target down.”

Blandino, who now works as a rules analyst for Fox Sports, said he agreed with the decision on Branch and also, like the NFL, judged Woods’ hit on Olave to be “bang-bang” and not worthy of ejection even though “the result was terrible.”

That will come as little comfort to the Saints and Olave, who suffered his second concussion this season and fifth of his career. Asked this week about how the NFL decides whether to eject players, interim coach Darren Rizzi said: “Well, I’ve got to be honest with you. Sometimes I don’t really understand it either. The ejection part of it, the fine part of it, all that kind of stuff. I’m going to pass on [giving] my opinion there because I don’t think it’s going to go down a good road.”

Comparing the Branch ejection to the Poyer hit on the Bills’ Coleman, however, illustrates the difficulty the NFL can have maintaining consistency through each decision. Blandino said he viewed the plays as “very similar” and wondered himself why Poyer was not ejected.

“I thought he had a clear path, lowered his head and left his feet,” Blandino said. “So that was the question that I had. What is the difference? Why was Branch considered an ejectable play and Poyer’s wasn’t?”

Consistency among NFL officials has long been an issue, which is part of the reason owners agreed in 2018 to let the league office weigh in on ejections. (Vincent has the authority to add an ejection to a penalty, but only when a flag is thrown first.) So while it may be understandable when an offensive lineman is penalized for holding in one game when a similar block goes unpenalized in another, the ejection structure is designed to minimize such discrepancies.

“If you’re talking about one or two people making those decisions,” Blandino said, “then I think it should be consistent across the board. But whatever the process is, once that flag is on the ground, then that person, whether it’s Troy or whoever else is making that decision, should be alerted. And then they come in and they make the decision. I think as long as you have one person or a small group of people, I think you can be consistent.”

The NFL does consider some non-football acts to be worthy of automatic ejections, including a punch, a kick and contact with an official. But in each case, Anderson said, the league has tried to set up parameters to ensure that it doesn’t apply to inadvertent or relatively mild aggression.

A punch worthy of disqualification, for example, usually comes with a “clenched” or “closed” fist, Anderson said. But not every time.

“It doesn’t mean that you can’t have a severe enough swing, even with an open hand, if it’s that egregious and that severe and flagrant from that standpoint,” Anderson said. “That could certainly rise to the level of a disqualifying striking blow.

“And that’s just like a kick. If you intentionally kick at somebody, you’re not just lifting your leg where you trip him, but you swing your leg and strike. That’s usually about the closest thing to an automatic disqualification with the foot that you’re going to have.”

The presence of human judgment will always leave some rulings open to debate, but there are tangible factors the NFL tries to apply. Those elements usually help explain a decision — but occasionally they do not.

“It’s obviously the thing that we take really the most seriously,” Anderson said. “Because the game is about our players, and the last thing the league wants to do is to remove a player from the game. They are who our game is about, and they’re who the fans want to see. So that action, we take that very seriously.”