What We 'Hate To See' About Big Football Hits

Just before halftime in the Seahawks-Cowboys game, Ricardo Lockette took a hit and did not get up. He stayed on the Cowboys Stadium turf for five minutes or so, motionless for much of that time.

"That's a big time hit right there, he's out, and you hope he's OK," commentator Troy Aikman said shortly after the impact, despite the fact that Lockette was very clearly not OK (Lockette will need neck surgery). "We see these collisions in the kicking game whether it's on kickoffs or punts as it was there. Big time collisions that they've eliminated from everything else within the game, but these are violent hits that happen in the kicking game that we continue to have."

After Thom Brennaman read a Movember promotion for "men's health"—a tone deaf bit of irony, when a man is lying unconscious on the field—the commentators continued to talk about how football, in general, is pretty safe, except for special teams.

"Very, very, very violent collision," Brennaman repeated.

Next, NFL rulebook expert Mike Pereira came on the broadcast to say no rule was violated in the hit: "You look at it and you just hate to see these. What might could it be? Is it a blindside block? It is not. It came from the front." After talking about how much safer football is since the kickoff line got moved, Peirrera echoed AIkman's line again: "You just hate to see this."

Despite Aikman's claim that these collisions only happen in the kicking game, a hit nearly identical to Lockette's happened during regular play in that very quarter, when Cowboys offensive lineman La'el Collins trucked two Seattle defenders, the second of which came with Collins running at full sprint and lowering his head into Earl Thomas:

Thomas got up. He was, by all indications, fine, and so Collins's play got the "What a hit!" blogging treatment from SB Nation, Deadspin, and this website, among others (we compared Collins to a cartoon character). Not surprisingly, the official NFL Youtube page gave La'el Collins his own highlight video. The play also got an NFL.com video, titled "La'el Collins Makes Great Play For Teammates," which is hilariously inaccurate given the play was basically over when he trucked Thomas. Neither NFL.com nor its Youtube channel posted a video of the Lockette hit.

Yes, there were minor differences between the two hits. Collins was a bit more plainly in Thomas's field of vision, although it's not clear that Thomas was either looking directly at him or still engaged in the play. On the other hand, Lockette clearly saw Jeff Heath at the last minute and lowered his head in an instinctive effort to protect himself, just another reminder of Heads Up tackling's fundamentally flawed logic. Lowering one's head while running is a natural, if not almost necessary, movement. The NFL is literally trying to redefine human physiology in an effort to make their sport safer. Shockingly, it isn't working.

This is not about the particulars of the given hits. My guess is, if you show both these hits to someone unversed in football's cultural narratives but well-educated in blunt force trauma, they're unlikely to see a real difference. Collins lowers his head, too; he could just as easily have made helmet-to-helmet contact with Thomas and knocked him out cold, in which case NFL.com wouldn't be praising him for making a "great play for teammates." In fact, they wouldn't have posted the video at all.

"You hate to see this," the FOX broadcasting crew kept telling us, but what, exactly, do we hate to see? Two men running full speed toward each other covered in armor? The lowered helmets? The collision? One man flying to the ground? No, we only hate to see "this" when someone doesn't get up. We will hate it, but we will keep seeing it, because it's going to keep happening, in front of record TV audiences. These two hits illustrate just how fickle and undefined the line is between what we love to see and hate to see on a football field. And so we will keep seeing both.