Richard Sherman defends Barry Church for his hit on Rob Gronkowski

Richard Sherman has an opinion on the Rob Gronkowski hit, and it’s exactly what you think it is.

All it takes is one hit to completely change your Super Bowl outlook. In the Wild Card round, the Kansas City Chiefs lost tight end Travis Kelce to a concussion and it drastically altered their offensive play calling. A similar scare was had by Patriots fans in the AFC Championship game when Rob Gronkowski took a helmet-to-helmet hit from Jaguars safety Barry Church.

The play was flagged and New England ultimately scored as a result. But the damage was that Gronkowski had to be taken out of the game after suffering a head injury and didn’t return before the end of the half. It wasn’t a debate about the Patriots without Gronk so much as it was a return to the never-ending debate about whether defensive players are allowed to do their jobs or not.

It wasn’t a question of whether or not Church hit Gronk helmet-to-helmet. Richard Sherman saw the play and went right to the defense that Church made the only play he could have given the rules against defenders.

This has long been the argument made on behalf of defensive players who are flagged for hits they might not have been able to avoid. There are varying degrees of applicability, but Church’s hit didn’t seem like it was malicious.

There are two folds to this. One is that we’ve seen plenty of seemingly kosher hits get flagged for being illegal. That leads into the second fold where defenders are forced to change the way they tackle out of fear of being flagged and a general lack of knowing what a clean hit is. Like the catch rule, it seems that what a tackler is allowed to do is always changing, and it’s going to be a sticking point for defensive players until it’s fixed.

Church’s hit wasn’t clean, but why he hit Gronk where he did and why is the real debate here.