NFL owners hold spring meeting in Minneapolis: Here's what they've done

MINNEAPOLIS -- NFL owners are in Minneapolis this week for their annual meeting, and the agenda has included rule changes, Super Bowl and draft locations and more.

Below is a roundup of everything owners have discussed and approved this week.

Fair catch kickoff rule approved

The NFL has pushed the kickoff return further toward irrelevance with a priority on player safety.

League owners voted Tuesday for a one-year trial of an enhanced touchback rule that will give the receiving team the ball at its own 25 with a fair catch of a kickoff anywhere behind that yard line.

The proposal passed despite an expression of distaste for it from coaches and players across the league. They argued the rule change will create uglier plays with squib and corner kicks that are impossible for fair catches.

"I've been in this for a long time. I've seen these type of health and safety discussions," said Atlanta Falcons chief executive officer Rich McKay, who is chairman of the competition committee. "We tend to get ourselves to the right place, but it's never that comfortable."

The NFL said its statistical models predict the return rate for kickoffs in 2023, under the new rule, will drop from 38% to 31% and that the rate of concussions on the sport's most dangerous play will be reduced by 15%. Concussions on kickoffs occur more than twice as often as on plays from scrimmage, and that rate has risen significantly over the last two years.

One reason for the recent increase in head injuries? The improved skill of kickers to be able to strategically hang the ball longer and higher in front of the goal line, allowing the coverage more time to make a tackle and keep the opponent's drive start deeper than the 25 for an end-zone touchback.

The NFL essentially copied a rule that was already in place in college football.

"We needed to do something," McKay said. "We just can't sit there and ignore that data."

Green Bay to host 2025 draft

The NFL draft will be in Green Bay in 2025.

The league announced the 2025 draft's location on Monday during its spring meetings. The draft and related activities will take place inside and around Lambeau Field and Titletown, the collection of shops and restaurants surrounding the stadium. With an expected 250,000 visitors, the draft will be the largest event ever held in Green Bay, which has a population of 107,000.

"We're the smallest market in the National Football League by a wide margin, but we're a big community," said Ed Policy, chief operating officer and general counsel for the Packers. "I think it's very fair to say that no other community on the planet has as close of a nexus to the past, present and future of the game of football than Green Bay."

READ MORE: Legendary Vikings head coach Bud Grant's life celebrated at US Bank Stadium  

Next year's draft will take place from April 25-27 in Detroit. After being held at various New York locations from 1965-2014, the draft has made stops in Chicago (2015-16), Philadelphia (2017), Dallas (2018), Nashville (2019), Las Vegas (2022) and Kansas City (2023).

More than 2.2 million people have attended draft festivities since 2015. This year's draft brought more than 312,000 fans to Kansas City.

Now it's preparing to head to the league's smallest market. The Packers first applied to host in 2016, and the NFL pushed them to answer questions about hotel space and transportation infrastructure.

"The beauty as you've seen in the draft is that there's not a real barrier to hosting it," said Peter O'Reilly, the NFL's executive vice president for major events. "We can work through weather. If it can be in Green Bay - no offense, Ed - we can be anywhere."

NFL approves limited flexible scheduling for Thursday night games

Thursday nights in the NFL have long been the most drastic feature of its made-for-TV schedule, a prime-time slot that raised concerns about player safety and produced plenty of competitive duds before it moved to a streaming-only platform.

Now the league will have the power, albeit limited, to change the matchups.

NFL owners approved Monday a flexible scheduling policy for Thursday night games on Amazon Prime Video, for Weeks 13-17 only and with at least 28 days' notice given to the affected teams. The league could push a Thursday night matchup in that range to Sunday afternoon if there's a more desirable game, a mechanism currently in place for Sunday night and Monday night games.

No team would be required to play more than twice on Thursday night in a season. The rule is just for 2023, for now. Any game during Weeks 13-17 could be selected for the move to Thursday night, but the league said the bar for such a shuffle would be high.

READ MORE: Vikings' 2023 season schedule released: Here are the main takeaways  

"We're incredibly judicious and incredibly sensitive to flexing a game and all the dynamics that go into that," said Hans Schroeder, executive vice president and chief operating officer of NFL Media. "We're also trying to balance how we get the best games in the best windows for our fans."

In addition to the prime-time allowances for flexing games, the NFL also now puts the entire Week 18 schedule up for grabs until the week of so it can show two games with playoff implications on Saturday.

New York Giants owner John Mara, a critic of the proposal for its negative impact on fans, said after the vote that he was disappointed but not surprised.

Emergency QB rule passes

Also approved Monday at the NFL's spring meetings was a rule that allows teams to play an emergency quarterback from the inactive list if the first two are injured during a game, a decision that stems from San Francisco's depth-chart challenge in the NFC championship game.

The bylaw was initially proposed by the Detroit Lions. The third quarterback designation will not count against the limit of active players - either 47 or 48 - that is determined 90 minutes before kickoff.

The emergency activation can only occur after injury or disqualification, not for a performance-related decision or other conduct. If either of the first two quarterbacks are cleared by the team's medical staff to return to play, the third must be removed from the game and can only return as a quarterback if an injury scenario arises again.

If a team puts three quarterbacks on the active list for a game, it can't use the emergency option. Game-day practice squad elevations are not eligible, either.

The 49ers had running back Christian McCaffery warming up his arm in the NFC championship game in Philadelphia, after Brock Purdy injured his elbow and Josh Johnson suffered a concussion. Purdy was forced back into the game but unable to throw the ball more than 10 yards as the 49ers scrapped their game plan for a run-heavy attack in their 31-7 loss to the Eagles on Jan. 29.

The 49ers had already lost their top two quarterbacks - Trey Lance in Week 2 and Jimmy Garoppolo in Week 13 - to season-ending injuries.

Owners express optimism on Commanders sale

Owners were also updated on the pending sale of the Washington Commanders from Dan Snyder's family to Josh Harris' group, a prominent if not pressing issue. No vote on the record $6.05 billion transaction will occur this week.

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, a member of the league finance committee, expressed guarded optimism about the completion of the deal.

"There's certain criteria that has to be met, and that's just the way it is. It's not there yet, but it doesn't mean that it can't get there. It's complicated. Put it that way. I could explain it to you, and it wouldn't tell you anything," Irsay said.

Neither Snyder nor his wife, Tanya, came to Minnesota for the meeting. The league's preference, Irsay said, is to have the deal approved prior to the start of the regular season. Irsay indicated the amount of money at stake and the amount of investors involved in Harris' group - which includes Basketball Hall of Famer Magic Johnson - has lengthened the approval process.

"We're working hard. Everyone wants to get it done, and it's seeing that it just complies with league policy. It's a complicated deal, so we're trying to just work through it and we're hopeful we can get it done. It's going to take probably several more weeks of discussions before we see if we can reach the goal line," Irsay said.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he wasn't concerned about the viability of the bid from Harris, who owns the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers and the NHL's New Jersey Devils with partner David Blitzer, as long as it's properly structured.

"Which it will be," Jones said. "It's too important for them to have the right structure coming in, because they'll benefit by the way it's been structured for everybody else in the past."

There's no timeline in place for a vote.

"These are outstandingly qualified owners," Jones said. "That always rules the day on getting it cleared with the NFL."

Super Bowl goes back to Bay Area; 49ers to host in 2026 at Levi's Stadium

The Super Bowl will return to the Bay Area in 2026 at the home of the San Francisco 49ers, following a vote of approval by NFL owners on Monday at their spring meetings.

This will be the third time for the big game in the Bay Area. Levi's Stadium, which opened in Santa Clara in 2014, also hosted Super Bowl 50 when Denver beat Carolina. The 49ers won Super Bowl 19 at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto when they beat Miami after the 1984 season. The 2026 game will be Super Bowl 60.

Niners team president Al Guido said he hopes the NFL's decision to return to the Bay Area 10 years after the Super Bowl was last here is a sign that the region will be part of the regular rotation along with other Western cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

"We needed a facility that had the size and scale that this one had," Guido said. "There's been a lot of changes that have happened around the facility and in general around the Bay. I think hosting this now in a competitive process 10 years after we hosted the first one, when you have other major markets that will continue to host, both SoFi Stadium, Allegiant Stadium, a lot has changed since we hosted. I do believe that this puts us up for future Super Bowls. We have to pull this one off."

Guido said there will be some changes from Super Bowl 50 with more of the events in San Francisco moving from downtown to the waterfront area closer to where the Golden State Warriors built their new arena near the San Francisco Giants' ballpark.

Both those facilities are likely to be used for events this time around with the opening night ceremony expected to be held at Chase Center.

The Super Bowl will be part of a big 2026 for the Bay Area and Levi's Stadium, which also will host games in the World Cup that summer.

"(It's) going to be an amazing year for our region," Bay Area Host Committee President and CEO Zaileen Janmohamed said. "It's the same year that San Francisco turns 250 years old and it's also the year that we will host FIFA World Cup matches. So with the addition of hosting Super Bowl 60, we have this incredible opportunity that doesn't really exist anywhere else to unite the entire region with sport across multiple sporting events. I'm ready and excited."

The next Super Bowl is scheduled for Feb. 11, 2024, at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Super Bowl 59 will be played at the Superdome in New Orleans in 2025.

NFL expands sports medicine diversity program to 19 schools

The NFL has expanded a program for minorities and women in sports medicine, aiming to increase diversity among athletic trainers and medical staff across the league in line with similar initiatives for coaches and the front office.

The league announced Monday at the spring owners meetings in Minnesota an expansion of the pool to match diverse students from 19 medical schools with NFL clubs.

The NFL Diversity in Sports Medicine Pipeline Initiative began last year with 14 medical students from historically Black colleges and universities completing one-month clinical rotations among eight NFL teams, in partnership with the NFL Physicians Society and the Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society. Medical students interested in primary care sports medicine and orthopedic surgery were selected for the pilot program, and this year the number of participants has been more than doubled.

"We need more minorities, diverse people. We need more females to continue to come within the programs, within colleges, secondary schools," said Reggie Scott, vice president of sports medicine and performance for the Los Angeles Rams.

The league plans to expand the initiative in the future to include additional player-care disciplines such as physical therapy and behavioral health in the immersive and holistic program. The overarching goal is to boost historical underrepresentation of women as well as Black, Latino and other minority races in the field.

Given the decade-plus process of education, from medical school to residency to fellowship, another one of the NFL's goals is to raise awareness of these occupations further upstream.

"The earlier that we can get people inspired, the sooner they can get on to the types of requirements that will get them into the programs and then allow them to start seeking out the mentors," said Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL's chief medical officer.

"So they're not just aware of the field, but they can be confident applicants when it comes time to matriculating and matching into fields like orthopedic surgery," said Kelsey Henderson, a graduate of Meharry Medical College in Nashville who was a 2022 participant with the Tennessee Titans.

Henderson had a picture of her with Sills and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell featured in her class yearbook, a potential inspiration to future candidates.

"When I applied to medical school, I really didn't have any mentors so I really just had to figure it out on my own," said Omolayo Dada, a 2022 program participant from the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta who worked with the San Francisco 49ers.

"I felt like I was part of the family from the get-go," Dada said.