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As our sister site Pro Hockey Rumors celebrates its four-year anniversary, we’re looking to add to the writing staff! In particular, we’re seeking someone with strong daytime availability Monday through Friday. The position pays hourly. The criteria:

• Exceptional knowledge of all 31 NHL teams, no discernible bias.
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The NFL discussed a set of rule changes on Thursday. Here is how the league opted to proceed:

• A proposal to implement a fourth-and-15 play to replace the increasingly difficult onside kick was tabled, Tom Pelissero of NFL.com tweets. This proposal would give teams the option of eschewing kickoffs for a 15-yard conversion — on an untimed down — twice per game. This marks the second straight year the league tabled such a proposal. But teams were split this time around. The unofficial straw poll had 16 teams for and 16 against, Mike Garafolo of NFL.com notes (via Twitter). This rule, or something similar, will almost certainly be revisited again as some momentum now exists to adjust the onside kick.
• The opposition to the fourth-and-15 proposal came largely from owners fearing it could be a bridge to eliminating the kickoff altogether, Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk notes. The NFL pushed back against that perception, viewing the potential rule change as merely a way to help teams’ comeback efforts — now that the no-running-start rule has worsened onside kick recovery odds.
• Both sky judge proposals did not even make it to a vote, with each being withdrawn in advance of Thursday’s discussions, Pelissero notes. But the league did approve a preseason experiment that may lead to such a change. The approval will allow for increased communication between on-field officials and those in the booth during this preseason, and NFL executive VP for football operations Troy Vincent said (via Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com) it could be a bridge to adding a full-time booth official to each crew.
• This preseason experiment partially stems from the NFL being concerned about having to hire 17 booth officials to act as sky judges, the Washington Post’s Mark Maske tweets. Fear of potential unintended consequences — as was the case in the one-and-done pass interference review system — prompted the league to scrap the sky judge proposals, per Florio. But the cost of hiring qualified booth officials almost certainly played a role, Florio adds.
• Teams will have an additional IR spot this coming season. Three players can now return from IR.

League owners will vote next week on two major proposed changes to injured reserve rules, per Albert Breer of SI.com (Twitter link). The first would allow up to three players who have been placed on IR to return later in the season (currently, only two IR’d players are permitted to return). The second would make players who are placed on IR prior to final roster cutdowns eligible to return.

The first of those proposed changes is fairly self-explanatory, though it wasn’t that long ago that a player who was put on injured reserve was automatically ruled out for the rest of the season. In 2012, clubs were permitted to return one player from IR during the season, but they had to designate a specific player as a return candidate. In 2016, the rules were modified so that teams did not have to slap a “DTR” label on a specific player and could instead return any IR’d player they wanted. And in 2017, the league began allowing teams to bring back two players from injured reserve.

Throughout those changes, however, one thing has remained constant: in order to be eligible to return from IR, a player had to make his team’s final 53-man preseason roster. So we frequently saw situations like that of Kurt Coleman last year, who was cut by the Bills prior to final cutdowns just so that Buffalo could carry tight end Jason Croom on the 53-man and then place him on IR (thereby making him eligible to return later in the season). Buffalo re-signed Coleman the next day.

That type of borderline senseless roster maneuvering may soon be a thing of the past. Still, a player on IR will not be permitted to practice until six weeks after landing on injured reserve and cannot return to game action until his team has played eight games after he was put on IR.