Rugby league has a need to find controversy where there is none. It sells the product, it drives engagement, it occupies the space between betting advertisements, and it’s utterly inane.

As if the quality of the game, midway through one of the greatest seasons of all time, can’t sell itself.

The sky is perpetually falling, even during the closest and most exciting competition we’ve seen in years.

The latest example of doomsaying is the dreaded hip drop tackle. The bane of rugby league, the end of the sport as we know it, won’t somebody please think of the children!

The dreaded hip drop is here, lock your doors and bar your windows!

Why, we might as well just pack the whole thing up and play touch footy if we’re going to be policing the dreaded hip drop tackle.

“Back in my day,” the old man begins as he yells at a cloud, “we hip dropped players til the cows came home. Why, I remember when John Sattler got hip dropped so badly in the first tackle that the shock wave travelled up his spine, his entire jaw fell off and he played a full 80 minutes without a face and nobody ever even got penalised, let alone binned!”

We need to be abundantly clear here, with no ambiguity whatsoever, that there is absolutely no problem with the hip drop tackle. None. Nil. Zero. It is being handled exactly as it should be. It is being handled well. But the desperation of commentators to justify the endless airtime they have creates an issue where there is none.

Because if you’ve been following footy long enough, and I dare say most of you have, you’ll remember seeing all of this happen before. Many times. And every time it has not, in fact, been the end of rugby league as we know it. Quite the opposite, actually. It always makes the game stronger.

The sport of rugby league has always been an arms race between teams developing new techniques to gain those tiny advantages that add up to premierships, and officials deciding where and how to draw the line. Because nobody ever knows where the line truly is until it gets crossed.

In fact, you can probably calculate a footy fan’s age by the first tackle controversy they can remember. Far from being the worst thing to happen to the game, the dreaded hip drop is merely the latest in a proud tradition of modifying the rules of the sport to prevent its players from being horrifically injured. Which is, obviously, a crazy idea.

The classic example is, of course, the high tackle. Any contact above a player’s shoulders is against the rules. Why? Because it turns out a person’s head is important. The ‘any’ part of that is the crucial detail. The contact with the head may not be malicious, deliberate, or intended. It may be a complete accident. It usually is a complete accident, there are very few examples of a player deliberately hitting someone in the head.

But intent doesn’t matter. Any contact with the head is a penalty and, depending on how bad the hit was, a fine, suspension, sin-binning, or send-off is used to punish the offender and deter anyone from that behaviour in the future.

You can’t lift a player past the horizontal in a tackle, even if the player is very gently placed back into a standing position. Why? Because it’s incredibly dangerous. The risk is too great and players can be, and have been, grievously injured in such tackles. Again, the intention doesn’t matter, only the outcome. Ask Jarrod McCracken or Alex McKinnon if the intent of Stephen Kearney or Jordan McLean made a difference to the outcome.

There are many, many types of these tackles in league. All of them springing from legitimate, legal forms of tackling that can have unfortunate, and unintended, dangerous consequences. All of them result in various punishments ranging from penalties to send-offs. None of these penalties care about the intention of the player committing the offence.

The grapple, the crusher, the chicken wing, the flop, the cannonball, the prowler, and now the hip drop – the list goes on. All of these tackles are dangerous and all of them are outlawed.

And they also have something else in common. When each and every one of them was cracked down on by the ARL or NRL, the pundits and the punters declared that the game had gone soft and that the end was nigh. Each and every one of them had commentators saying, “No, no, no, no, nooooo.”

And yet, here we are, stronger than ever.

Does anyone remember when the shoulder charge was eliminated and the game was supposed to die out in less than a year? But rugby league endures.

Almost like it was always a good idea to stamp these types of tackles out of the game. Brutally and decisively.

There has been no shortage of discussion about the decision on Thursday night to penalise and sin-bin Broncos forward Patrick Carrigan for a hip drop tackle.

The peanut gallery almost immediately erupted in their umbrage, which was so predictable that you could set your watch to it. Most bemusing was the commentary from Paul Gallen, who loudly voiced his ire and declared that the tackle shouldn’t have even been a penalty, let alone a sin bin.

Of course, this is the same Paul Gallen who thought that it was kosher to try and tear apart Anthony Laffranchi’s stitches in a tackle, so perhaps his opinion comes with a number of caveats.

Patrick Carrigan has every right to claim there were mitigating circumstances in this tackle gone wrong. Carrigan slipped, and in the course of his stumble he managed to place himself in a position where he, unintentionally, performed a hip drop on Nelson Asofa-Solomona.

Carrigan never intended to perform an illegal tackle, he never intended to injure Asofa-Solomona, and the tackle itself was an accident resulting from a unique combination of poor positioning and physics in running. Nobody is debating that. But the result is the same.

But that seems to be the line that Carrigan, the Broncos, and the wider rugby league media seem to be running with. Patrick Carrigan didn’t mean to do it, so it’s ok.

Is it? Do the rules work that way? I challenge you to try that defence in any other aspect of life and see how far it gets you.

The Carrigan penalty was unfortunate, but it was the correct decision. Because that is the rule. Earlier in the year the NRL made a concerted effort to stamp out this tackle and put out an edict to all 17 clubs that anyone performing this action will be penalised and sin-binned. Everyone was warned and nobody was ignorant.

Carrigan twisted the weight of his body onto the leg of the attacking player, however unintentionally, and was penalised and sin-binned to the letter of the law. Nobody has any right to complain, it’s clearly in the rules. Arguing against this is simply farcical.

To really illustrate the point, how about we posit an alternative scenario? In another reality, somewhere in the multiverse, this is what happened instead.

Nelson Asofa-Solomona is carting the ball up. Patrick Carrigan lines up in defence. It’s all the same at this point. But instead of sweeping in from behind, Carrigan lines up a shot on NAS, enforcer on enforcer.

Carrigan aims to hit him straight in the sternum, just above the ball. If it connects then it will be replayed all week, one of the best hits of the round. It will rock the Storm’s enforcer, probably dislodge the ball, maybe change the course of the game.

But – just before the point of impact – Asofa-Solomona tries to sidestep out of the contact. His studs don’t grip in the greasy conditions and he loses his footing. He begins to fall. Right as Patrick Carrigan is coming in for his big forward-on-forward contact. The one that, until a microsecond ago, was going to be a thunderous and legal tackle.

Instead, now it hits Big Nelson straight in the chin. Above the shoulder. A high tackle, in other words. Now, in this scenario, should there be a penalty?

Because remember, in this hypothetical situation, Carrigan didn’t mean to hit Asofa-Solomona high. The circumstances of the game changed during the execution of the tackle. It was an accident, it was unintentional. It was a good tackle gone bad at the last nanosecond.

Should a penalty be blown?

The answer is, unequivocally, yes. Because that’s what’s in the goddamn rules and it has been forever. I cannot believe there are people arguing this point, it’s like arguing against gravity.

Rugby league has never been bothered by the ambiguities of deontology. It doesn’t matter what the player’s intention was, the penalty is always based on the outcome. A high shot is a high shot no matter if the player’s arm slipped, the ball carrier tripped, the wind blew, the planet suddenly shifted in its orbit, aliens attacked, Jesus returned, or the defending player was filled with bloodlust and just wanted to murder the attacker.

Intent means nothing, the rules were breached. A high shot is a high shot.

So why do we have this sudden ethical and moral crisis when it comes to the latest injury-causing, potentially career-ending, obviously dangerous style of tackle? Why is there, to quote Fox’s favourite term, ‘debate’ over something which is unambiguously against the rules?

If a player accidentally sends a defender over the horizontal, with no intent or malice, just an unfortunate application of physics during a game in motion, is that less of a dangerous tackle? Oh, he didn’t mean to do it, so we’re overreacting in penalising it? There was no intention to suplex the ball carrier, it was accidental, the bin is an overreaction.

So, why then do we act like the hip drop is different to every other illegal action in the game?

Perhaps the next time we see a falcon, and there have been a few lately, and the ball ricochets off the head of a player and into the waiting arms of a teammate who is standing directly in front of him, we should open up a debate over whether or not the player was actually offside because he never intended to be offside. It was accidental.

Maybe the next time a goalkicker misses a conversion there should be a ‘debate’ over whether or not it was actually a goal, because the kicker obviously didn’t intend for it to go wide of the posts. It accidentally blew in the wrong direction.

All of these scenarios are farcical and they are all equally as ludicrous as the utter circus regarding the hip drop.

Dangerous tackles become part of the vocabulary, the league cracks down on them, penalties ensue, games are lost because of it, and eventually the players figure out that they might need to alter their techniques or else continue to lose games.

This is how the process has worked since 1908. It is working again now. There is no crisis. This is business as usual. It’s the circle of life.

Even now, at its height, the hip drop ‘crisis’ is hardly that. The hysteria is pure survivorship bias. The media focuses on the few tackles every week that they know will sell outrage, and they conveniently ignore that most games in a weekend have no ‘dramas’ at all regarding this new tackle crackdown.

In the Rabbitohs-Tigers match there was not a single hip drop over the entire game. Not one. The league’s best attacking team and second-best defensive outfit against cellar-dwellers on a roll and trying to prove a point, you’d think that a match-up like that would be rife with the dreaded hip drop, either from a good outfit bending the rules or a weaker team out of desperation and yet…nothing.

Not a single wayward hip drop. Almost like there isn’t a problem at all.

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The sad madrigal of doom coming from the media is as tiresome and predictable as always. It isn’t novel, it isn’t even entertaining. It’s just boring at this stage. Confected outrage for the sake of it. It’s a cut and paste job from the last time the world ended and the template is there for the next.

The attention span of the public is short and its memory even shorter, and that is the only reason that the ‘experts’ are able to get away with this lazy pablum. The reality is that the game is as strong and entertaining as ever. But ‘everything is going well’ never made a good headline.

So yeah, sure. The hip drop tackle is the end of rugby league as we know it. Just like the crusher tackle was the end of rugby league as we know it. Just like removing the shoulder charge took all the fun out of the game. Just like the cannonball, the chicken wing, the grapple, the rolling pin, the chin strap, the ripper, the crusher, the prowler, the wing-nut… all of them were the death of rugby league at the time.

Answers on a postcard for what the next existential crisis will be. And the one after that. And maybe one of them we’ll all remember that there never was a crisis in the first place and, no matter which team we follow, we can all appreciate having more players on the park and out of the casualty ward.