FanPost

The Cleanest Hit in History

I like many others, was very annoyed when Luke was flagged for a Personal Foul last night on one of the best hits I have seen from a Panther not named Kraken in a long time. There was a lot of conversation and debate on whether or not it was clean (did the helmets make contact, did Kueckly's arm hit the helmet, was Aaron Mellette a defenseless receiver). So I decided to break it down.

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I took the above gif and blew it up which reveled some pretty interesting stuff.

First I wanted to make note that you can see Keuchly diagnose where the possible receivers are and then when he gets just behind the goal posts pauses to read Flacco.

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And read him like a book he does. He instantly reads his eyes to know exactly where he is going.

Now we get to the fun part.

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Here you can instantly see that the ball is already in Aaron Mellette's hands so pass interference is already out of the question and people who were saying Luke was not going for the ball are instantly wrong because he knows exactly where he has to hit to knock that ball loose.

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Here you can see Luke start to turn his head to make sure he puts his shoulder to the ball and completely avoids any helmet to helmet contact.

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This is after the ball has been knocked loose and it is blatantly obvious that Luke has done everything to avoid contact between helmets. You can also see from the picture taken at the same time from a different angle below, that he has his right arm tucked under his body to ensure that there is no hand or arm contact with the helmet.

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So after reviewing all the evidence I have determined that Luke was able to diagnose the possible receivers, read Flacco like a book, realize the ball was in the receivers arms, position his arms and head in a way that there was no possible illegal contact made, and then rock the hell out of the receiver in the of the cleanest and smartest hits I have ever seen. And he did all of this in about half a second

This all being said I understand Football is played in real time and refs have to play it safe (even though it would appear they have an entire commercial break to look it over). So while they were wrong, I don't blame the refs (but if he gets fined I will riot). The main reason I wanted to point all of this out is to prove what everyone here already knows, that we have one of the smartest and quickest athletes in the NFL/World and Kuechly is a beast. That is all.

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