Bucky Irving is a victim of one of the NFL's latest controversies and he could miss time as a result

What is a hip-drop tackle?

It is a foul if a player uses the following technique to bring a runner to the ground:

• grabs the runner with one or both hands or wraps the runner with both arms; and
• unweights himself by swiveling and dropping his hips and/or lower body, landing on and/or trapping the runner’s leg(s) at or below the knee.

Penalty for a hip-drop tackle: Loss of 15 yards and an automatic first down.

Bucky Irving could miss the Seahawks game and possibly more

The Bucs just can't catch a break with the injuries. As soon as they get someone back, they lose two more guys. Football is the ultimate game of attrition but damn, this is hard for any team to handle.

An ankle injury is never good and that's really true for a player like Irving, whose game is built on shiftiness and elusiveness. This is pure speculation, but it's easy to see a world where he is out for a game or two. Even more so when considering the Bucs have to travel to Seattle this weekend and it's a six hour flight. Plane rides can escalate certain injuries and this is the longest flight the Bucs will take all year long, as it's basically a coast-to-coast trip.

The NFL can't seriously outlaw hip-drop tackles

And that's because they still don't even know how to officially determine them!

The NFL has created its own mess with attempting to remove hip-drops from the game, while at the same time, publicly stating it doesn't know how to fully define a hip-drop tackle. That's pretty silly, ultimately. The league is conducting an experiment that can really affect games in certain situations.

The fact they missed this call, when it was a play that was reviewed, is pretty abhorrent in itself. Plenty of times we've seen refs discover a penalty was committed while reviewing something else, only to apply said penalty and forgo the initial outcome. If this isn't identified upon dozens of rewatches after the fact then the NFL just needs to forget about it's hip-drop ban campaign.

Either way, it's all in the past. What's most important, now, is Irving's health and the hope that this doesn't happen to another Bucs player -or any player for that matter- in the future.