LBS- The Bengals were penalized five yards for offsides on Boswell’s first kick attempt with four seconds remaining in the game. During the pay, a Cincinnati player stuck his foot out and made contact with Boswell’s kicking leg.
As far as Boswell is concerned, a player would never jump that far offsides unless he is trying to injure the kicker. “You’re not jumping offsides that bad without trying to run into the kicker,” Boswell said Monday morning, per Chris Adamski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “It’s not an accident at all. If you look in the NFL for the last two years, multiple teams have done it just to try to … either if it’s running into, blocking the kick, doing something. But Seattle did it last year against the Bills, Ravens did it against us last year — and now Cincinnati.” ----- Well, fair is fair. Kickers might be inherently more susceptible to bullying given their fragile frame in comparison to a vast majority of their peers, but we can probably consider it an addressable issue whenever it's this blatantly obvious. I'm all for doing everything possible to get in the head of a player who is capable of deciding the outcome of a game from a position that's probably about 65% mental, but a little subtlety never hurt anybody. There's jumping the snap in hopes that you can go undetected in blocking a kick, and then there's completely disregarding the presence of a line of scrimmage while getting a running start before wildly swinging your leg as if you're trying to boot the neighborhood stray two yards over. I'd be hard pressed to argue this was anything other than a case of the latter. Still, as fucked up as it is to sacrifice five yards in hopes of causing a game-altering injury, I don't think I'm quite ready to discuss Chris Boswell having to kick a field goal with some numb piggies during a game that featured both temporary paralysis as well as the shortening of 5-10 life spans. Like, in order for me to put a scummy special teams play in the top five most ugly incidents that took place during the officiated street fight that was the Bengals/Steelers game, I think it would have to require limb reattachment. Perhaps if the foot bone was no longer connected to ankle bone and both were visible to the naked eye by way of compound fracture then that play could maybe get it's own topic on television sports talk roundtables, but sore toes? Let's either save those for a less perilous week, or find a way to loosely connect them to irreparable brain damage.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
Archives
January 2020
|