15 Yards or 15 Years ?

[BoomerSooner]

Originally Posted by ajmc

Ignoring (tolerating, excusing) blatant disrespectful/thugish behavior ONLY serves to encourage more of it. It's a genie, once let out of the bottle, is really hard to get, and keep, back in.

Are you quoting me in your post because you interpreted my post to say I thought the contact in this situation should have been ignored? My point was that you either have an ejection in this case or you don't have a penalty at all. Unless the flag was for something the player said and not for the contact, an ejection is a mandated part of this penalty that cannot be declined or waived off. If the referee decided not to flag the contact and instead something else, that is his judgement, and while I don't agree with it, that is the only other route to not ejecting the player.

The other part of my point is that there are situations in which a player contacts an official and the situation is completely unintentional and innocent, but when it is more than this and ejection is a required part of the penalty.