Quote:
Originally Posted by chapmaja
A targeting 2 would be a situation where the player intentionally leads with the crown or attempts to injure an opponent.
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You really want officials to distinguish between an attempt to injure and an attempt to piss him off?
I like it better when the rules are broadly written in matters of unnecessary roughness -- like just using that phrase -- and points of emphasis could take care of, you know...points of emphasis. You know, like just a reminder that heads and necks are vulnerable and important, and that officials should administer the game with that in mind.
I don't think football game officials should have quite as much discretion as rugby referees, but almost. (I think rugby refs have a little too much.) The rules makers have been requiring officials to make finer and finer judgments as to the facts on things they see. Is that any better than letting them make more
general judgments as to whether a hit was gratuitous or gratuitously rough and/or extravagantly dangerous, even if only negligently so?
Which would you rather be screwed by: a factual determination that takes slo-mo eyes and looks different from different angles? Or a general judgment of opinion that people can disagree on when looking at the same facts? I'd rather take the latter. I'd rather blame it on an
opinion regarding a grey area than to blame an official who had to rule on whether a hit was on one side or another of a fine definite line that's very hard to see.
Nobody will ever be satisfied by where that fine factual line is drawn anyway. One's general sense of how dangerous a play should be allowed could never be captured by such details. So why should the rules makers chase their tails trying to spell them out?