I just had time to go back and listen to the Wade Phillips press conference from yesterday. I guess over half of it was about Roy Williams, his suspension, his tackling technique, the horse-collar rule in general, and it just kept going and going. It was obvious that Wade truly believes there should be modifications to the rule and hinted he’d speak up about it at the offseason meetings. I don’t know about that Wade, the rule looks like a good one to me. Whether you should suspend someone for it I guess is the question. I mean, what if a guy had three personal-foul facemask penalties in a season, should he be suspended? There is definitely a chance for injury on those. Or three personal-foul calls for hitting out of bounds? I know they’ve suspended guys for helmet-to-helmet before but this process could start to look arbitrary when some are suspended and some are not. But, having said all that on one side, the NFL had warned Roy about this and hinted that that something like this could occur if he did it again. Ultimately, as a professional, Roy has to stop doing it. There is an argument that you should take the penalty to help the team in a game, pass interference comes to mind if your beat, but that only holds if you’re not going to be suspended. Maybe Roy didn’t think they would suspend him before they did, but going forward he’ll have no doubt. He has to stop doing it, with no qualifiers. It’s just not acceptable for him to do it anymore.
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