I want to address your statement that Griffin "asked" for these hits. What does that have to do with them being legal or illegal? If he had gone to the media and said "Defenses, please don't hit me!" would that make them more illegal? I'm not trying to be a dick, just curious where you're coming from with that comment.
This is my view point on the subject... for what it's worth, it also seems to be the prevalent view point of the hosts on 980 and their callers. Whatever that's worth to you
Late hits out of bounds along the sideline are a grey area in football. We can go through the years and find some hits that were called and others that weren't and not be able to make sense of why one was illegal and the other wasn't. You can do that for most of the penalties.
You have someone running to the sideline with the ball. He's being pursued by another guy running full speed trying to cut him off and force him out of bounds. The NFL has decided to give the ball carrier a way to (essentially) declare himself out of the play and therefore avoid a hit by punishing people for hitting him out of bounds in a way that most reasonable people could say "hey, you knew he was going out of bounds..." If the player is then going to abuse that system by trying to convince the defender he's actually not going out of bounds, then the defender is going to hit him. To turn around and say you're baiting him is, in my opinion, to tell everyone that it's now ok to hit him; he's purposefully trying to convince you he's going to turn the corner and run up field, not go out of bounds. What is it you want the defender to do? Read his mind?
In addition to that Griffin is quite a different QB than most others; he has world class speed and has shown it. He's capable of turning the corner and going down the field for a TD and making the guy that thought he was going out of bounds look like an idiot.
To me it's the exact same thing as the read option stuff - if you're going to purposely confuse the defender about what the real situation is (in the read option it would be who has the ball), then you lose the protection you would normally get in that situation.
At some point in time the defenders need to get some consideration for what it is they're trying to do too.
So when Griffin came out and said he's baiting people to draw a flag, I think that pushed the threshold for what is illegal and what is not a little further down the line than it would be for, say, Peyton Manning. Whether that's right or not, listening to the radio majority of people knew instantly that's what those comments would do. The lack of calls in the bears game seems to prove that to me, but it's admittedly just one game...
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