Dante Moore Is The Latest Victim Of The Most Obviously Stupid Allowable Act In Team Sports - The Quarterback Slide
Let's get one thing clear first - this USC punk can flip burgers for the rest of his career for all I care. Acting like you're hot shit after knocking a guy out who's head was on a tee is about as pathetic as it gets. I think we all know that type too. The kid in high school who hung with the bigger guys in a rough crowd and never entered a brawl til the end to hit a guy who's already on the ground in a headlock. Real tough guy. We get it.
Forget this kid. We're missing the real point with everything around this discourse. Sliding is the entire problem here. Forget about a career even, this is life alteringly dangerous and should be completely outlawed at any level. And it's so obvious, yet no one seems to realize it in sports media.
You heard the answer right from Terry McAulay too: "As soon as he starts his slide, he's defenseless"...
Gee Wiz. I wonder if maybe that's been the real problem then all along...
There might never be a better example of the point I've been trying to make over the past three or four years now. Sliding is the most dangerous allowable act in team sports and needs to be banned. And no one in sports media has the guts to say it. It's not hard - make it a 15-yard penalty for any foot-first slide and send a half-paragraph long comms letter to school AD's or NFL GMs explaining that if any player wishes to give themselves up on a play they have to go down shoulder first. Payton Manning style. If you don't want to get hit - don't run in the first place.
Everything that's dangerous with sliding is on display here with Dante Moore. You have a fast quarterback who's trying to do the mental math to know when the perfect time to start sliding is without having any conception for how long it actually takes a defender running at him to stop his momentum. And if he errs on the side of being a fraction of a fraction of a second too late, he puts himself in literally the most dangerous possible position you could fashion him. There’s zero opportunity for the shoulders, back, arms or anything else to absorb and dissipate the impact, while the slide simultaneously lowers his head closer to the ground, thus shortens the distance over which it can decelerate before smashing into the turf. Remember the ole saying "falling doesn't kill you, landing does". Same concept on these slide hits. It's not the hit from the defender - it's the landing on the turf. Oh yeah - all while the head is at the exact height a defender is aiming for when setting up for a legal tackle on a runner.
This is one of those things that is so absurdly obvious that I actually start wondering if I'm in some Truman show shit. This is not hard. I'm not some genius for seeing this for what it is. Everyone else is just straight up stupid.
What are people not seeing about this? How am I the only person in sports media who sees this? Everyone seems to agree Moore slid late, but the dots to this kindergarten level puzzle still don't seem to be connecting. Sliding is the problem here. Even if you think the defender was dirty, had Moore been trained not to do the most dangerous thing humanly possible in that situation, he'd have taken a hit to the shoulder and trotted back to the huddle. Just like would have been the case for countless other quarterbacks in college and the pros who instead went unconscious.
I actually do have a theory to explain why people can't figure this out. This is a classic frog sitting in a heating pot of water situation playing out in real life. The fact that football has morphed from plodding slow quarterbacks with shoulder pads as big as airplane wings to the almost olympic level fast is why we see this shit happen so much today vs prior years. The defenders aren't all the sudden turning into awful people (at least before the hit). If you think all these guys want to get fined, thrown out of games, suspended, etc. in broad daylight with every eyeball on them, you're a crazy person.
But let's go back to when the stove was first turned on. The NFL officially allowed feet-first sliding as a means for players to give themselves up in 1985. Guys like John Elway, Bernie Kosar, Phil Simms, and Dan Marino who couldn't beat cement pouring down the chute of a mixer in a race. Probably why Chase Daniel doesn't get it. He would've fit that bill too.
That's the problem with carrying the same rule into today's game. Quarterbacks are faster than anyone in 1985 would have imagined. Especially in the last ten years or so. Mike Vick walked so Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, and so many others could... well... run. And there is no realistic way for a quarterback running at full speed to perfectly calculate the exact moment he should to start going down before a defender has already committed to the hit. Tell them to slide earlier all you want. Quarterbacks won't always do it, especially when trying to get a first down as was clearly the case here. And if you think a defender is also going to have any conception of when the right amount of time he has to wait before committing momentum to a tackle on a guy running 20 mph, you couldn't possibly tell me you've never played sports more.
Assuming a quarterback can reliably thread that needle and know when is the correct time to slide is the original sin. It's the lazy assumption the NCAA and NFL make. Maybe Chris Chandler could pull it off while moving at the speed of a fat hot dog vendor squeezing down an aisle, but those days are long gone. Why are we letting these suits in league offices get away with this? The heat should be 100 percent on them. Instead they're probably all sitting in their office with their lawyers saying "we're safe from lit here because we tell them they can slide".
These are the real goons here. The league offices. They turned on the stove. They see it boiling. And until sports media realizes it and makes a stink, frogs are going to continue to boil.
Here's a few of my past attempts to show the world some semblance of intelligence.
