‘Are they protecting us?’ Chiefs are ticked about the hit on JuJu, and they should be

The replay must have been shown more than a dozen times here inside Arrowhead Stadium, each of them as uncomfortable to watch as the last. All the while Chiefs wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster lay helplessly on the ground with several teammates kneeling beside him, including one who would later say he was on the verge of tears.

The Chiefs beat the Jaguars on Sunday, propelling themselves into first place in the AFC behind another 335 yards and four touchdowns from Patrick Mahomes — ho, hum, right? — but this isn’t about the quarterback that looks every bit a front-runner MVP candidate or the team that looks every bit a Super Bowl contender.

Instead, it’s the aforementioned image — the lasting image — from the game that spoke all those truths.

Oh, and the audio that accompanied: “There is no foul for unnecessary roughness.”

The mere optics of this are terrible, the kind of optics the NFL should and does want to eradicate from its game. They don’t want you seeing what in-stadium video screens and CBS cameras would not stop putting in front of your eyes.

Jaguars safety Andre Cisco rammed his helmet into the head of the Chiefs receiver so hard that it prompted the “fencing” response from Smith-Schuster, an indication he might have been knocked out.

It was dangerous. Avoidable.

In the end, the referees elected to shrug their shoulders in response.

“That’s not a good feeling — at all,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said of walking onto the field as Smith-Schuster lay on the grass. “And that’s what I tried to explain to the officials there. Guys don’t get hit in the shoulder and lay around like that right there. Somewhere, the head was involved. And so that’s what the rule’s put in for — that type of thing.”

The hit had been shoulder-to-shoulder, the referees would tell Reid and later repeat in a pool report. They had initially thrown a flag before electing to pick it up, which is probably even worse, because one referee must’ve been so sure of the call that he convinced the others of it. While I need to acknowledge that dozens of calls are missed every game and every week, it’s rare that the evidence of your inaccuracy is literally lying on the ground in front of you.

Rare those misses have the potential for these kinds of consequences, too.

It’s unfathomable to ignore either.

We aren’t dissecting what Chris Jones said to a quarterback to draw an unsportsmanlike penalty, a flag that might have decided a game in Indianapolis.

Smith-Schuster was diagnosed with a concussion as a result of the hit. Mahomes said he spoke with Smith-Schuster after the game and “he seemed perfectly normal.”

But concussions, of course, can have short- and long-term effects. Smith-Schuster, for what it’s worth, was sitting at his locker as reporters entered the room.

This will hopefully have a positive ending.

Just a close call, right?

Well, it’s also an easy call, and I mean this literally, it’s one that cannot be missed.

If the NFL is serious about player safety, it has to take these hits more seriously. The most violent of collisions are part of the game’s past, but must they remain part of its future? That’s not an avocation to eliminate every hit. There is somewhere between flag football and the discomfort we were subjected to Sunday. Cisco chose to duck his head before contact. Chose to aim high. He needed to do neither.

There is not a snap-of-the-fingers solution but instead a requirement for a message loud enough that culturally its place in the game becomes less and less obscure until it truly has no place at all.

Who received that message Sunday?

Hell, two plays later, Cisco recklessly smoked Marquez Valdes-Scantling, only narrowly missing his helmet in the process. Valdes-Scantling left the game to be checked for a concussion.

Cisco will almost certainly be fined for the first hit, but as of this writing hours after the game, his punishment was nil.

Is a fine, which has no effect on the outcome of a game, going to eliminate that play? Maybe you’re less skeptical than I am.

A flag would be a start. If you want to argue a more severe punishment — an ejection for the worst of these — I’ll stay silent in opposition.

At the very least, in the event a referee completely whiffs, it needs to be a reversible error. If a referee believes, say, that Smith-Schuster has the appearance of being knocked temporarily unconscious by his shoulder pads, then involve New York. Involve replay.

It is not a call to be left to human error. Get the second, third and 15th look we all received instantaneously. They do it all the time, you know. More than we realize because, guess what, it doesn’t take much time.

What’s more important than getting that call right? Saving a few seconds?

The point isn’t to catch the offenders of helmet-to-helmet hits but rather to prevent them altogether. That’s an idealistic goal, to be sure, but it is worth striving to reach just the same. You aren’t setting up a speed trap on I-70 and collecting the profits of the tickets. You are installing a speed bump, complete with neon signs alerting every driver as frequently as possible of their existence.

“Those kinds of hits are not welcome in this game, man, because we’re all playing and putting our lives on the line every single play,” Valdes-Scantling said. “Are they protecting us?”

Actually, that’s precisely what this particular hit was.

Welcome. Allowed.

Football is a violent game by design, and the league is never going to eliminate that hit completely, though Chiefs safety Justin Reid pointed out that he has not levied that kind of hit in his five seasons. Even with the rules outlawing the discomfort we saw Sunday, Cisco still delivered the blow. Knowing it should be flagged.

A flag probably doesn’t change its outcome.

In time, it could change the next.