Originally Posted by
OldRightHander
What we're seeing in the NHL and the NFL is an effort to protect players from head injuries and at times that leads to calls like this where an official goes too far to the point of penalizing a clean play. He hit him clean and his head snapped back, so the referee goes overboard and calls what he perceived to be a head blow, but with where he was positioned, there was no way he could have seen a blow to the head had one occurred. I saw several clean hits penalized in the NFL this past season as well where someone just came close to the head. In this case, you had a major penalty handed out with ten minutes remaining in a tie game. That kind of call has a good chance of directly affecting the outcome of a game, so the referee has to be absolutely that he actually saw the infraction. Games should be settled by the players, not by the referees.