WyoBrandX said:
Wyovanian said:
WyoBrandX said:
calpoke25 said:
I think it's actually pretty obvious he was jumping on his teammates back to celebrate the play, his teammate moved in the meantime and he was falling and bracing himself. His teammate is trying to catch him you can see. That being said I still think it warranted a penalty but this talk of criminal battery is absurd.
I agree.
Criminal battery is absurd in a football game unless a player starts beating up a ref or a fan.
I saw it from the stadium and thought it was a cheap shot as well. After rewatching it, I have no idea. Something should have probably been called.
It was a close game. We could have won that game on any number of merits. Officiating wasn't one of them.
People used to say the same thing about hockey and basketball. Participation in a game doesn't suspend the rule of law. It would be like saying that if a player somehow brought a gun onto the field and opened fire at the opposition, then it wouldn't be the same as if they weren't playing a game. Running across a field after a play is over and whistled dead and delivering a sucker punch is just as criminal as if it occurred in a parking lot.
There is a huge difference between playing in a game where rules are defined and the rule of law. Taking a gun, knife, or any other weapon for that matter anywhere to cause harm upon a person is criminal (unless there are some legal gun/knife fighting sports that I'm not aware of somewhere).
Hockey is much different than football. Football is much different than boxing. Fighting on the street is much different than fighting in a sport. If it wasn't, football as well as many contact sports would have many arrests during each game. Most contact sports would be illegal.
Hockey has as much or possibly more contact than football, and basketball has less, but incidents in both sports have resulted in criminal charges against players who engaged in contact that fell beyond the boundaries that are both explicit and implicit in the rules of the respective games.
We have penalties in football for certain forms of excessive roughness, such as horse collars, targeting, etc. that generally happen in the course of play. A player, however, who was nowhere near the end of a play who deliberately walks yards across the field of play after it is blown dead and delivers a blow to another player who is not in much of a position to defend himself or flee is not exceeding the threshold of roughness the rules allow, rather, that player is committing an assault and possible battery on a participant when no rule-defined action is occurring, therefore the player's actions are not protected as game activity.