Clay's hit was so text book on what not to do that NFL, Inc is sending it to all the teams as a teaching lesson but apparently it is not such an egregious play that they needed to fine him. Interesting.
Seems more like they made a mistake and won't admit to it.
Originally Posted by: wpr
I would guess that most personal foul penalties don't result in fines. That doesn't make them bad calls.
I don't know what, if anything a player in Matthews position could do to avoid a call like this in the future. The speed and the angle and direction of both bodies upon impact and thus the results of the play are often determined in the brief instant prior to contact. If Clay were to have prevented any of that he would have had to change his approach. I'm not sure how a player can do that and not change it INTO something that may result in a illegal hit.
Methinks the key determining factor in this case may have been Clay's left arm sliding down and appearing to hook Cousins right leg at the knee and lifting him up. I think this is what Hazer has been arguing. I'm not sure if this was intentional on his part or just a natural result of physics. I certainly couldn't tell on any of the video angles I watched if Clay lifted him or not. His leg came up but since he was leaning back at the time of the hit physics may have caused it. It looked to me as if Clay's arm slid down to the knee and he then extended it as if to attempt to break the fall. It could have been part of his attempt to prevent landing on Cousins with all his weight.
I don't think this should have been a penalty and I don't think Kendrick's hit earlier should have been either but we had better get used to it because if this is the new standard for illegal hits we are going to be seeing a lot of them.
The sad thing is this won't go away for a while because every single similar hit that isn't called will be compared to this hit