Dirty-shmirty. Clean-shmean. Football is deadly. It was designed to be deadly. The clock isn't the only thing that gets "killed" during the two-minute drill.
I juxtapose these two plays in Hamlin's recent career to underscore the point — which was made properly neither in the initial horrified media reaction nor in the feel-good sequel — that "making football safer" is an illusion. For every band-aid fix of the rules, there's a Newtonian equal and opposite reaction, a cosmic game of life-and-death Whack-a-Mole. In the second Hamlin play above, he was dutifully following the recently emphasized "heads up" tackling doctrine (which is already almost always impossible to execute at game speed). The result left him unconscious on the field, without a pulse, seconds or minutes from death.
