Chris Owusu - why does this keep happening?

I think it’s a sprinkling of everything, but If I had to pick a single factor, I’d probably go with bad luck. Owusu runs a lot of routes that leave him susceptible to these types of hits. He certainly appeared to dip his head on yesterday’s hit, but don’t other receivers? That seems like a natural thing to do when you’re turning around and getting ready to charge up field. I guess I’ll pay attention during today’s NFL games.

Like a lot of you have pointed out, the way the rule is written, there is NO QUESTION that a penalty should have been called on the play.

Andrew Luck has a tendency to throw to him in bad situations too. That throw against USC should never have been made. Owusu had no chance to catch it and he led him right into a streaking safety, and that’s not the only time I’ve seen him do it too.

I really hope Shaw does the right thing and doesn’t let Owusu play (not for selfish reasons of course) but with 3 concussions in 4 weeks he’s only one bad hit away from never walking onto the field again.

Otherwise he’d take those hits on the pads. In combination with the observations above, this helps explain things to an extent.

I’d add this point:

Owusu has a rep as a big play receiver, so he draws a lot of defensive attention, but it’s my impression (no stats to back this up, so maybe I’m totally off-base) that he’s become essentially a possession receiver, catching the ball on short routes with the hope that he can get loose and spring it for a big gain.

Whether due to his history of drops, lack of separation (he’s fast for a Stanford WR), or because he doesn’t fight for balls the way, say, Baldwin or (Ryan) Whalen did last year, he’s not getting (or at least catching) the ball on the long routes that you’d think the speed guy would be running, where he’d be most likely in single coverage and less likely to get clocked by a DB or safety. Instead, he’s catching the ball where there are a lot of defenders nearby.

Obviously he’s not the only player catching short passes, but this may be part of why he’s taking bad hits more frequently of late.

If Owusu’s head duck is so obvious, the defensive players he faces should be coached that you need to get low on him or you could draw a serious penalty and/or even a suspension.

This just smacks of the perspective of someone who has never made a tackle in his life.

Poyer didn’t lead with his head, Owusu dipped into the contact, rather similarly to how Javes Lewis smoked him at Autzen the year before after Owusu lost his balance upon initial contact and again, didn’t keep his helmet up as he fell. As a defender, just like Poyer did, you square up to blast a guy with your shoulder, keep your helmet up to protect your own spine, wrap up, and leg drive him to the ground. However, the textbook tackle is not always possible. Nevertheless, this new interpretation of the targeting rule is preposterous when the offensive player is turning himself into the target.g

When a ball carrier dips into contact with his head and upfield shoulder, it is unsurprising if he takes the head shot.

Neither Lewis the year before, nor Poyer this year, targeted Owusu’s head, which implies an intent to injure via delivering an intentional head shot. These were both accidental plays, and not really preventable upon the part of the defenders. Chris runs into contact using poor personal safety technique and has now twice been KO’d under rather routine football circumstances.

Both of Owusu’s KO’s have one thing in common—himself.

There can be no “blaming the victim,” as I read someone say on The Cardboard, if the guy is a victim of his own poor football running technique.

But Owusu was not just concussed, he was KTFO. That was not a “lights out” type of hit. You can bet some collision just like it happened in every D-1 league over the weekend. No one else save for Owusu had to get evaluated on the Glasgow Coma Scale in an ambulance.

“If Owusu’s head duck is so obvious, the defensive players he faces should be coached that you need to get low on him or you could draw a serious penalty and/or even a suspension.”

Players aren’t going to re-learn everything they have been taught just because one player has poor running technique. Like Canard said, the only person that can be blamed here is Owusu. He is a great receiver, and I am glad he is alright, but eventually you are going to have to take some responsibility for what’s going on.

He’s the progenitor of the “jacked-him-up” hit. All the defenders who tackle high and “through the player” rather than wrap up can be traced to Lott. That’s why he’s so revered by so many. It’s why every big-hitting defensive back instantly brings a reference to Lott over a decade after he retired. And he’s from USC, so it’s easy to blame him by default.

There have already been declarations from some quarters of the Cardinal fanbase that we only won last year’s game against Stanford because Javes Lewis leveled Chris Owusu, “illegally,” despite the inconvenient facts that Lewis was not targeting Owusu’s head nor was the rule being interpreted in such a ticky-tack manner as it is this year. There was nothing illegal about that hit last year.

Secondly, we all have watched our team play for the highest of stakes over much of the past decade. Frankly, this “automatic crime” of hitting an offensive player in the head, no matter the circumstances of its happening, is a bad rule that alters the entire course of ball games when it goes down like it did against OSU last Saturday.

You don’t see many OSU fans arguing about it for two reasons. Foremost, they were never going to win that game anyway. They also don’t have very many internet fans in Beaver Nation who are imbued with much ardor for this year’s team.

That said, we Ducks fans can take sympathy with what happened to their team last Saturday in that the circumstances of the play were eerily similar to the one that we obviously benefitted from a year ago. To think that because Owusu has a seemingly isolated issue with keeping his head up into contact that PF flags get thrown on what has classically been a clean hit, and a return for a TD called back that did amount to a 10 point swing, is appalling.

Perhaps instead of fundamentally altering the nature of the game through trying to micromanage the hitting in the course of play, the conference should require much longer mandatory sits for players who’ve been knocked out.

Lest you think this is totally self serving, last year at WSU, one of our key players, Kenyon Barner, was knocked out cold on a KO return, fumbled the ball to WSU, (who went on to score a short field TD), and eventually he was hospitalized for the weekend. We didn’t see him again for at least three weeks, and then not in the return game until bowl season.

Despite him having been hit in the head, no one, absolutely no one has called what happened to him an illegal hit—either then or since.

“Neurologists say once a person suffers a concussion, he is as much as four times more likely to sustain a second one. Moreover, after several concussions, it takes less of a blow to cause the injury and requires more time to recover.”

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/football/head_injuries/index.html

If you want to avoid concussions there are two things you can do. One, make it a 15 yard penalty for a defensive player to leave both feet in order to make a tackle, whether the play results in a head to head hit or not. I think this the rule in rugby. It would avoid most head to head collisions in the secondary, but wouldn’t affect the head to head collision at the LoS. Two, you can take off the helmets, or replace plastic shell helmets with simple padded or leather helmets. It’ll force people to be careful about where they put their heads.

Obviously people will complain that this changes the game and forces defenders to relearn how they tackle. But isn’t that the point?

I think Oregon probably would’ve won last year despite that hit, which yes, I do think was illegal.

In SU v. UO last year Owusu was thrown a pass in the right flat. He headed upfield. He was tripped up by a lunging arm tackle. He fell forward as Strong Safety Lewis was already committed to hitting the previously upright runner in the waist/leg area. Instead, his shoulder pad catches the stumbling Owusu on the head and KOs him.

For the vast majority of football history, including 2010, that was not a penalty as there was no intent to strike the player in the head, it was just happenstance.

To call such a tackle illegal is basically to say you no longer want to watch tackle football because the risk inherent in playing it is too much for you to bear any longer. These hits will continue to be seen despite everyone’s re-education and good intentions because the field is chaotic, full speed, and stuff happens.

Time for two handed touch, which could still result in a player losing his balance and striking another in the head without intent on the part of either player. Really, what would be the difference anymore?

Let’s just disband NCAA football and make everyone field a “men’s” soccer team already.

The head hit rule as being done by the Pac-12 is just ridiculous. Even in baseball there are judgement calls based on intent. If a pitcher errantly lets one fly that strikes a player in the helmet, he is not ejected, either on the spot, nor is he suspended retrospectively.

If he is throwing chin music regularly, he’ll be warned, or already have a reputation, and if he then strikes a batter in the head, he will be ejected and subject to additional league or conference discipline.

That sort of common sense is missing from the Pac-12’s take on this rule right now. Casey Locker’s and TJ McDonald’s hits are being treated the same as Poyer’s and that is a ludicrous result.