The AFL believes scrapping the centre-bounce "party trick" will attract more umpires to the game and make them better decision-makers in the process.
The league has punted the centre bounce and removed the substitute rule under significant changes to be introduced for the 2026 season.
But a decision on the mooted "last-disposal out-of-bounds" rule won't be made until after the next AFL Commission meeting this month.
Umpires will no longer be required to bounce the ball to restart play at any stage in elite-level matches.
New AFL football performance boss Greg Swann said the decision was made with umpire health and safety in mind, as well as a desire to create consistency across all competitions.
He noted the bounce was sparsely used in lower-grade, junior or pathway competitions
"As we've got pathways and umpires coming through, we've got some fantastic decision-makers in those groups, but they can't bounce the ball," Swann said.
"So that's been an issue, and we need to make that pool of umpires bigger.
"The other thing we think will help in that space is that (the bounce) is a skill you have to put a fair bit of time into practice, and what we'd rather do is have the umpires putting their skills into making the correct decisions, so we think that'll allow that to happen as well.
"We've spoken to a lot of former players about getting involved in umpiring, and all of them talk about 'it's too hard to bounce the ball', so hopefully that helps with that.
"And we've got some terrific female umpires as well who have just struggled physically to get the ball up as high as they need, again, good decision-makers, and this should help that too.
"So we think we can broaden the base."
Swann also believes umpires throwing the ball up will lead to fewer collisions between the whistleblowers and players.
Swann understood that people liked tradition, but stressed he was "more interested in the umpires getting the decisions right".
"I always thought it was a bit strange - I used to call it a party trick, that you needed a party trick to be an umpire, which was to bounce the ball," he said.
A long list of AFL coaches have voiced their disapproval of the substitute rule this year, including Geelong's particularly vocal Chris Scott, and will be pleased to see the back of it.
Clubs will now name 23 players in their match-day teams, including five on the interchange bench.
Swann confirmed the All-Australian team will also increase to 23 players, with a five-man bench.
"Probably the strongest feedback on all the things that we spoke about was removing the sub, so we'll do that," he said.
"We're not changing the number of interchanges or anything like that, so there'll be five on the bench. We want to try to lock that away for a long time."
Former Brisbane Lions chief executive Swann has previously declared his support for the last-disposal rule, which is already used in AFLW and the second-tier SANFL.
