Safe slides are not safe when people do not pay attention

I feel bad for the quarterback at Vmi who was carted off the field tonight after being hit on a slide. We scream at the screen for guys to slide, so they do not get hurt, and Steve Young extended his career by sliding all the time. It should work, and then we see this poor guy getting hit while he is sliding. We have to make this sort of thing stop, and I have a particular problem with the idea of a good clean hit.

Perhaps we need to rethink that concept because I do not think it is working.

There are no good clean hits

I do not know if we can actually deliver good clean hits to players on the football field. I wonder if the rugby tackling system that Pete Carroll uses could be helpful, but I am not sure if violent sports can be clean at all. We can try to make them clean as possible, and we can play around with player safety even though the game is still dangerous. I have no idea how we can categorize a hit that sends a guy to the hospital as clean when it was clearly dirty. There are a lot of hits that are made on defenseless players every day, and we have to cut down on that as much as we can.

This was unnecessary

In the year 2017 everyone should have seen enough football to know when a guy is going to the ground. That is clear at this point. We have instituted rules for a lot of things to prevent unnecessary injuries, and hits like this should be an automatic suspension. You know that guy is sliding. You really needed to make sure he was down? You realize that in college football he was already down because he was on the ground? In the NFL, most guys will just tap him on the shoulder and help him up. They already know the play is over. Why is a guy at a school like VMI getting hit that hard when we all know it is not that big of a deal? Honestly, I went to a school that plays VMI in conference play, and it's not that serious.

They reversed the targeting call

That is the saddest part of this. I am sorry, but there is no way in the world you can have this happen while someone is sliding and not call the player for targeting. Being a dumb college kid is silly most of the time, but not knowing how to hit someone in a football game is dangerous. That targeting foul would have helped in that kid would have been suspended. The whole thing is sad because we cannot even figure out that it is not normal to run into people at full speed. At the very least, you should avoid it when you do not need to be doing it. I hope the QB from VMI is ok, and I hope that we have learned a lesson.