JeffreyMiller wrote:Seriously? A roundhouse swing of the helmet onto another person's head is not "assault"? It was intent to injure and in no way within the spirit of competition or acceptable violence of a gridiron contest.
Not sure what you're asking since I am failing to see where I said it was not an "assault"?
I'm only seeing that I said I was dreading the overly dramatic, hyperbolic, and 'use it to prop ones self up as infallible' type responses from the media, which included -in the context of which it was used and the context of our times- a so-called buzz word like, "assault" -- which was only one of multiple examples I gave.
Others are certainly free to view it as they wish and react according to their own sensibilities. As stated, I saw it, thought "you can't do that, he should be suspended." Which seems reasonable, to me.
I did not however fly off the handles, possibly because I've seen worse on a football field and in sports (McSorley was much worse and a non-buzz word assault in it's time) so yes, it gets an eye-roll from me when I turn on sports networks and hear things like "I've never seen anything worse in my x-amount of years covering sports" which overlaps with things like the aforementioned McSorley, things like O.J. Simpson, things like Ray Curruth, things like Michael Vick, things like HS football incidents where they really swing and connect with the helmet to a helmetless player's head repeatedly, things like the Ray Rice video, things like murder, rape, boxers dying (I watched a fight this year where the boxer was stretched out and died in less than 24 hours, that's significantly worse than a helmet bouncing off of Rudoph's head) and roughly hundreds to thousands of more examples in just my lifetime.
Which doesn't even cover before my lifetime when you can go far enough back to when football players literally died on the field with skulls caved in. So again, possibly just me but I'm not going to act personally offended as if this directly affects my day-to-day life or even act like this is "the worst thing that's ever happened on a football field" or even that it has never happened before -- I saw Incognito get his helmet ripped off and swung across his face not even that long ago.
Just shared how I personally reacted to it and that I immediately was dreading how it was going to be covered -- particularly hilarious on NFL Network where Steve Smith Sr. -am a fan of his for what it's worth- was giving his thoughts and I kept thinking "didn't you try to rip off multiple players helmets during games? And didn't you not once, but have multiple occasions of being up teammates in practice to where they had broken body parts and had to be stretched off the practice field and beat them up so badly that you had to turn yourself in?" ... and he was the voice of what you can and can't do in football, ha! Also funny when hosts asked a handful of football players if they've ever seen anything like that and they all just calmly nodded like 'yup, it's happened before' and they explained that it was something they saw in training camp and practice and not necessarily something you'd think you'd see in a game but still has happened "in football" before.