But if it is right, it renders dozens of Match Review Panel decisions before it wrong.
Read the MRP's full statement
The Thomas outcome may be the one most acceptable by true football people, that the North Melbourne forward's hit on Collingwood's Ben Reid on Sunday was more accidental than malicious.
But if it is to become the precedent on how such incidents involving head damage are to be viewed, then the crackdown of the past seven years has been a needless waste of emotion, energy and time.
Lindsay got away with one: Buckley
BT (Before Thomas) we were educated that players needed to take responsibility for the outcome of on-field contact, no matter the innocence surrounding the contact, and particularly if a player had had an alternative action.
The AFL's MRP has the most scrutinised job in the game and some of the nastiest observations are based on nothing more than manic allegiance.
Yet it regularly shocks neutral observers with decisions that simply do not align with reasoning made previously.
Head clash sparks war of words
Out of nowhere, the panel, in justifying its decision to clear Thomas, was happy to highlight a clause in its guidelines which provides a mechanism to rule leniently when "forceful contact to the head or neck was caused by circumstances outside the control of the player which could not reasonably be foreseen".
Thomas had an alternative. He didn't have to instigate contact with Reid. The ball was centimetres from the boundary line, Reid was not near it. That Thomas' own head also clashed with Reid is not a defence. Thomas chose to clash.
The Match Review Panel picks and chooses its moments to let players off sanctions for head hits.
It allowed St Kilda's Lenny Hayes the same leniency last year when he made high contact with Geelong's Taylor Hunt in a marking contest.
Yet it had no hesitation in outing North Melbourne's Jack Ziebell when he made head contact with Carlton's Aaron Joseph, also while clearly in contest.
The MRP says it refuses to be dictated by precedence, and maybe it is too difficult to apply the concept of precedence to incidents which occur in manic sporting contests.
But to not use it means there are examples everywhere of inconsistency.
Geelong's Trent West was let off despite mugging St Kilda's Xavier Clarke in 2008. Collingwood's Nick Maxwell was penalised for a hit on Patrick McGinnity the following year.
Another snapshot of the past. Bulldog Dylan Addison had a jaw broken last year in a clash with Stewart Crameri. The match review rated the impact high.
When Collingwood's Sharrod Wellingham broke the jaw of Carlton's Kade Simpson in that sickening collision of last year, the panel rated the impact severe. Surely a broken jaw is a broken jaw.
And what would the Match Review Panel have done if Thomas broke Reid's jaw? Well, who would know. But here's a guess – it would have suspended Thomas. And isn't that confusing?
It has become football mantra that the head is sacrosanct. From the chief executive of the game, Andrew Demetriou down, it has become footy chant. It is a corny phrase, but we've become conditioned to its meaning and most of us totally – totally - respect its sentiment.
But the head is not sacrosanct. The Thomas verdict means it is conditionally sacrosanct at best.
Among the numerous strong public utterances of Demetriou on this topic came in 2011: "Tackling is alive and well but you know what is not alive and well – head high injuries, neck injuries, the head’s sacrosanct, we make no apologies for it."
That assessment came after Melbourne's Jack Trengove was outed for a sling tackle on Patrick Dangerfield.
Trengove, along with Taylor Walker and others after him, would have loved the match review panel to apply a "forceful contact to the head or neck was caused by circumstances outside the control of the player which could not reasonably be foreseen" clause.
So dominant a mantra has the head is sacrosanct line become that certain players have clearly gone out of their way in recent years to exploit head-high contact in order to receive free kicks.
The law not only protected them to do so, it encouraged them.
And then the match review panel lets Thomas escape despite a deliberate action to hurt an opponent.
We could even extend this whole head debate into the really messy area of post-career brain damage, which is now dominating the American football and legal landscape and will inevitably do the same here some years down the track.
Good luck, AFL, defending in the courts of the land a mechanism which on Sunday afternoon saw a Collingwood player taken out of the game with a head injury incurred in a deliberate action by an opponent.
No, the game does not condone head damage, but the actions around the talk are often so confusing that the message is so weakened that you are left to wonder why we even bother to listen to the message in the first place.
