And this is what I believe will happen. I believe we will be hearing something about this soon.
Unfortunately, in my experience, overturning this call will be difficult. They will have to make sure that this cannot be considered targeting in the most generalized and loosely applicable form of the definition. They don’t have the leeway to judge if this is targeting. Their mandate will be to overturn only if “under no circumstances does this play meet the targeting standards”. Hoping I am wrong.
Especially since the rule is applied so capriciously.
Listen, if you watch the video frame by frame, it is as clear as Day Lucas turns his head to the left to avoid making contact and leads with the shoulder, which is what makes first contact and secondly, it’s only the side of his helmet near his ear hole, which makes contact with the other players helmet. The crown of Lucas’s helmet never makes contact with the other players helmet. This will get reviewed and if there’s justice, we’ll get overturned.
I disagree. I think the hit in Mali was the kid looking upfield at the ball in the air. He then turned and ran into him while making the tackle. It was truly helmet on helmet though. Lucas meant to tackle the receiver, not spear him. The shoulder hit and head slip is the tell tale that it was incidental to the contact. He was diving too (parallel to the ground) to make the tackle to limit yardage, not create more contact through supposed “launch”. The call against Lucas is a very bad call imo, especially to uphold it. It neeeds to be reversed. I don’t think the hit on Mali was malicious or intentional either. One being reversed upon review should have meant that they both were.
Josh Pate had a segment on targeting and specifically was talking about Lucas, 1. he was saying how dumb it was to have this serious of a penalty for something that no one knows what it actually looks like and 2. described the lucas hit perfectly, said these guys on defense are moving as fast as cars in a school zone, he makes the decision to go lower, form tackle in the chest or thigh area and the offensive player falls down in that split second into the strike zone and now you call helmet to helmet. It was all done because of the bad press about concussions in football. I do think there should be some type of caveat for players that are making tackles waist high. That Lucas hit it looks like he is only 2-3 ft off the turf, no way that should be targeting, keep it obvious when someone goes for the head or legit launches their helmet like a spear.
All I can hope is the appeal is going on behind the scenes and we get some good news on it because it clearly wasn’t targeting. The funny thing about targeting, is even the officials don’t know what the **** it is. Smh
Yeah the hit on Mali was just a football collision gone wrong
Honestly it’s helping us out and leads to a huge story when we win by 10
The ACC coming with it!