NFL Rules: How They Are Actually Made, and the Play 22 Owners Voted to Ban

The rulebook is a vote, not a document

Most sports have a body that writes the laws and everyone else follows them. The IFAB does it for football. World Aquatics does it for swimming.

The NFL does not work that way. Its rules are decided by the 32 club owners, voting at league meetings. The competition committee drafts, recommends and advocates — but it cannot enact anything.

And a change needs a three-quarters majority: 24 of 32 votes.

That single number explains more about the modern NFL rulebook than any individual rule in it.

The tush push: 22 votes, and still legal

The clearest demonstration came on 21 May 2025.

The Green Bay Packers proposed banning the tush push — the short-yardage quarterback sneak in which teammates push the ball carrier forward, perfected by the Philadelphia Eagles.

The vote was 22-10 in favour of the ban.

It failed.

Twenty-two of thirty-two owners — 69 per cent — wanted the play gone. The threshold is 24. The proposal fell two votes short, and the tush push remained entirely legal.

It was not revisited at the 2026 annual meeting, because no proposal to eliminate it was submitted. So a play that a substantial majority of the league’s owners voted to abolish is still being run today, lawfully, by anyone who wants to.

What a supermajority is actually for

This is not a malfunction. It is the threshold working exactly as designed.

A three-quarters requirement is a deliberate bias toward the status quo. It means a rule survives unless the case against it is close to overwhelming, and it protects any team whose success depends on a particular tactic from being legislated out of it by a simple majority of rivals.

The trade-off is visible in the tush push outcome. The same rule that prevents 17 owners from banning a rival’s best play also prevents 22 from banning one they genuinely believe is bad for the sport. You cannot have the protection without the paralysis.

Compare baseball, which rewrote five significant rules in four seasons through a competition committee that can act far more directly. The NFL’s rulebook moves slowly not because the league is conservative by temperament, but because its constitution makes movement expensive.

The kickoff, changed and changed again

The dynamic kickoff is the counter-example, and it is instructive.

The kickoff had become the most dangerous play in the sport, and the league’s response was a redesigned formation intended to produce more returns while removing the long, high-speed collisions that made the old play hazardous.

Unlike the tush push, it passed — because on player safety, owners converge quickly. And the league has kept adjusting it season by season rather than settling it once, tuning how the receiving team lines up, how touchbacks are treated, and when an onside kick may be declared.

That is the pattern: the NFL changes rules readily when the argument is safety, and slowly when the argument is competitive advantage. The voting threshold is identical in both cases; what differs is how easily 24 owners agree.

Trial rules, and why a rule can vanish

Some NFL rules are adopted for a single season on a trial basis and must be voted through again to continue.

This is worth knowing before trusting any NFL rules page. A rule can be accurate in one season and gone the next without ever being repealed — it simply was not renewed. And a proposal reported at a spring meeting is not necessarily in the rulebook: the agenda and the adopted rules are different documents, which is why this page distinguishes proposed from enacted.

What this means for reading the rules

It also explains what the rulebook chooses to legislate about in the first place. It regulates alignment and jersey numbers rather than position names — see positions in American football, where the rules turn out not to define a quarterback at all.

Three habits will keep you accurate on the NFL.

Check the season. The rulebook is versioned by year, and trial rules make year-to-year drift normal rather than exceptional.

Distinguish proposed from passed. Most coverage of league meetings describes proposals. Only some of them get 24 votes.

Remember who decides. Not the commissioner, not the officials, not the competition committee — thirty-two owners with competing commercial interests, one of whom may be the direct beneficiary of the rule under discussion.

For the scoring itself see how many points a touchdown is worth, and for more on the bodies that govern sport, how sport is run.