OL holding should be officiated differently. More like penalties in basketball. The line gets a set number of allowed holds per half and after that each one is a called penalty.
Yes that means they could hold more early on, but that would risk a higher likelihood of holding penalties in key moments at the end of halves when it’s more valuable.
Say the number is 5 allowed per team per half. There are 35 offensive plays per team each half. So the OL can only “get away” with holding on 14% of them, which I think we can all agree is less than the percentage of holds teams currently get no-calls on.
You could build in safeguards against abuses as well like; no exceptions under 2 minutes.
This would also allow linemen to learn how the refs will be calling holding for that particular game.
If this worked for OL Holding it could also work for PI.
It wouldn’t be a flag until the allowed holds ran out. They’d either make a 5 second announcement or just tell the teams on the sideline.