Is this flag football ?
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/10192598/Week-5-preview:-Is-this-flag-football?
Every time we think the pansification of American Tackle Football has reached a point of absurdity beyond which it cannot possibly venture, the great game takes another step in the wrong direction.
The Ravens were hit with two roughing-the-passer calls in their 27-21 loss to the Patriots in Week 4 that were even more ridiculous than the two laughable roughing-the-passer calls the Patriots were hit with in Week 1 against the Bills.
The combined contact of the game-changing 15-yard penalties on Haloti Ngata and Terrell Suggs brought to mind a lepidopterist handling a butterfly.
We get it. The league wants to protect the quarterback. But isn't that why he -- like all the other players on the field -- is wearing a helmet and pads?
That protection seems almost surplus to requirements when every love tap starts getting flagged. Defenders can't go high -- contact between hand and helmet or helmet and helmet is an automatic flag -- and can no longer go low. The window for where a pass rusher can drill the QB is narrowing to the point where every hit your team puts on a QB is followed by a breathless five-count hoping it didn't elicit a flag for being too high, too low or simply too hard.
The officials' willingness to penalize the most negligible contact on the quarterback has also given rise to the regrettable post-pass pleading that almost every QB engages in to try to get the flag. Never has the spectacle been more evident than when Brady was grazed by Suggs around the knees and turned immediately to referee Ron Winter and began his lobbying. Winter fell for it and the flag came out.
The sequence prompted former teammate Rodney Harrison to admonish Brady to "Take off the skirt." It was a dig and a demand that could be extended to the competition committee as well.
A lamentable 2006 roughing the passer call by Mike Carey on then-Bengal Justin Smith against the Bucs had established a new extreme of cottony softness, prompting Marvin Lewis to say, "I guess you have to cuddle him to the ground."
Lewis was joking. Three years later, it's no joke.
New prohibitions seem to arise every week. Sometimes refs appear to be making them up on the spot. You can't launch into the quarterback. You can't throw the quarterback to the ground. You can't "give the business" to the quarterback.
The bubble wrap is also spreading out of the pocket to other parts of the field. Defenders are told they cannot hit a "defenseless" receiver, a tough calculation to make when you're flying to the ball hoping to break up a 3rd-and-10. The officials are now asked to be forensic pathologists at a split-second crime scene and determine in the blink of an eye if a receiver was totally defenseless or only semi-defenseless.
When the Cowboys' Roy Williams got lit up by the Broncos D.J. Williams -- on yet another hospital ball thrown by Tony Romo -- it was the kind of clean hit that has more and more frequently been flagged just for the sheer, perfect force of it.
It wasn't flagged. Hallelujah. The play was a reminder of how great tackle football can be when they just let them play.
AGREED - A BUNCH OF OVER PAID PANSIES
