I take back what I said about Blount. Sorry Met, the media spun crap is the only kind of Oregon news we get down here :\.
As far as the UGA player getting Spikes' eye, I doubt it was as intentional that they were going for the eye specifically. That said, it's not just something he made up afterwards, as he was shown on TV missing a drive while they inspected his eye. UGA was taking shots at Spikes' head all game long after the plays were over, to the point where they actually drew two personal fouls for it, and I'm guessing it happened on one of those plays. On one, Ealey (the guy who Spikes went after) shoved Spikes in the neck/lower face area. In two others, Georgia linemen ripped Spikes' helmet off after the play was over and drew flags. Ealey even said in an interview that he didn't think Spikes should be suspended at all because this kind of stuff happens all the time in football, and that it was going back and forth all game long.
As far as how I feel about it, and whether or not I'm defending Spikes, I'm not. It was despicable, and as I said before, if they had manned up and suspended him the entire season I wouldn't have thought that was too much. However, all I'm saying is that Florida did what every other program would do, and has done in this situation, and followed the precedent that has been set. You can all sit here in your goody goody imaginary world and say that your coach would have suspended him for the year, but you'd be wrong and probably don't even really believe it yourself. You can sit here and say that if you were the coach with millions of dollars and tons of pressure on the line you'd make the focus of your team making the game so pure that jesus would play it, but you wouldn't.
To say that whether or not he was successful in gouging the eye is irrelevant is foolish, at least as far as the precedent is concerned. You can say it matters to you, which is easy to do from your desk chair, but we've seen how much it matters to the people actually in these situations. Wasn't it Georgia themselves a few years ago that got caught twisting Ciatrick Fason's knee in a pile after the play? Then not long before that FSU got caught putting Earnest Graham into a Ken Shamrock style ankle lock on the bottom of a pile? No suspensions or discipline to the players at all there, but does anyone really believe that if Fason's knee had popped or Graham's ankle had snapped those guys wouldn't have been kicked out of the NCAA entirely? Florida has been on the other end people trying to cause serious injuries to them plenty of times over the last few years, with even less harsh (read: no) penalties applied to those guys.
Like I said earlier, this is an NCAA wide thing, not a Florida thing. Florida actually went beyond the precedent that has been set for stuff like this in the past (IE if it missed, ignore it). That doesn't make it right, but I'm not stupid enough to delude myself to think that Urban Meyer has more morals than every other coach out there and thinks that football is just a vehicle for making a few kids into better people. Hey, maybe one day Tim Tebow will become a coach and we'll have that
. And maybe some day someone will set a better precedent, but I doubt it will be the #1 team doing it to their 2nd best player for a play where even the "victim" laughed it off and said it was no big deal.
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by Nfl Fan » Wed Nov 04, 2009 6:54 pm 
