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Originally Posted by JRutledge
Maybe I am missing something, but I have never seen anywhere that states that is illegal in NCAA rules either. And I hope you are not listening to the media who has completely bastardized the rules changes or emphasis on plays with helmet contact that is called illegal.
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NCAA 9-1 says, "All fouls in this section (unless noted) and any other acts of unnecessary roughness are personal fouls." So they too keep "unnecessary roughness" open-ended.
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It is fine to discuss other issues, but we should also be accurate in our conversations and not suggest something that has never been suggested as fact. Again I will concede on this point if you can show me some kind of suggestion that a hard hit is illegal.
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I don't think there's any such
explicit suggestion, but if you look upthread you'll see at least one poster who looks at hits like this as UR because they're not bona fide attempts at tackling. I think you have to look at whether the hit is aimed at stopping the runner's progress. In other words, the hardness of the hit is not sufficient to make it UR, but if it looks like it was for no tactical purpose, then it could be.
However, I think there's been a tendency to "see" head hits where there aren't any in the case of hard hits at shoulder level. In this case I don't think we have a good enough view to see whether there was a hit on or with the headgear, even with slow motion, and it looks like the field level officials would've had a better one; but in the previously discussed case with enough review it could be seen clearly enough that there was not a hit on or with the helmet. Yet the call on the field in that earlier case was a personal foul, and many people here at least initially seemed to want to see one. I think people are looking for an excuse to call a high hard hit illegal.
As the game is currently played in all the major codes, it pays for the defense to deprive the offense of every inch of advance of the ball, and sometimes doing so requires someone to take a flying leap at someone else. Slowing down would allow the runner to gain additional ground, albeit in some cases very little, but the way the game is, that very little is potentially decisive. In some cases hitting lower would also be less effective in that regard than a high hit. Such hits may therefore constitute roughness, but not unnecessary roughness. The rules could be changed to disallow high hits against ballcarriers in certain vulnerable circumstances -- such as a player who jumps to gain possession of a ball, or one who is being held as here -- but unless a compensating change of some sort were made, such a change would allow runners in some cases to advance with no legal way to stop them.