“You can’t be mad at 27 [Kazee],” Ramsey said after the game. “You have to be mad at the NFL; not mad at them but that is how the rule is. People are scared to tackle normal because I guess they don’t want to do helmet-to-helmet and get flagged. That was not even flagged and [you could] potentially get thrown out of the game. Game-changing stuff could happen. You don’t really want to blame anyone, but you feel bad for him. I don’t know, man, that’s just tough to see it happen to one of my teammates, period. But you can’t really blame 27.” - Jalen Ramsey -------- If you asked me to choose between 'two-seven' and the NFL in determining who was most responsible for the type of bang-bang play that is felt in the churning stomach of everyone who so much as watches it in slow motion then I suppose I'd begrudgingly choose the NFL. Blaming the league for the Marqise's Lee injury when it was the result of Damontae Kazee throwing the type of lunging, helmet-first hit they have made it a point to penalize doesn't make much sense. However, with the league disingenuously anointing themselves the safety police only after paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits, blaming them for literally every unsightly collision that happens on their watch certainly does. So, while I award Jalen Ramsey zero points for a rambling answer about a rule complaint that's exactly as fair as it irrelevant to the play in question, I at least have to give him credit for taking aim at everyone's favorite target. If there were ever a time to just baselessly blame the NFL then this is it, as they promote safety while un-ironically employing a position called "safety" in which the job description is anything but. That tackle was far more of the last line of defense making a "by-any-means-necessary" attempt at stopping the ball carrier than it was a split-second adjustment to a revised rulebook. That said, if the NFL thinks they are really going to make a sport in which the biggest, strongest, and fastest people on the planet bang bodies for every single inch anywhere remotely close to safe then why not hold them responsible for every instance in which professional football is proven not to be? After all, they are the ones that willingly took on an impossible task out of financial fear, whereas Damontae Kazee's impossible task was forced on him by a league that's doing everything possible to make his job impossible.
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