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I just sent this one to my rules interp for his opinion. I'm curious as to how some of you might explain this (meaning, how much "info" I should give)....
Team A's ballon B's 30 or so yard line, 4th down and 20 or so seconds left in the half. Team A has one T/O remaining. Team A illegally shifts and makes the LTG (inbounds)...down to the 8 with 2.7 seconds left.
Situation: Would have been A's ball 1st & G at the 8. Clock will start on RFP. If B accepts (which we did) we go back 5 from previous and possible untimed down. If B declines (and A doesn't take their last timeout which they had available) it would be the half. The coach of B was livid that I eventually gave an untimed down citing this can only occur on defensive fouls. We know he needs to be informed of Fed rules, but that's not the issue.
My question is this....how much info do you give to captains? The case book always recommends at the end of a period we should inform the captain about declining a foul and that the period could potentially end, but what if the other team has timeouts? Should I take the explanation that far? Something like "if you decline I'll wind the clock but keep in mind they might take a time out and they would get a down any way so you might want to take this"
What I did was give a normal explanation and didn't get into declining the foul. Why would I? Team A had a timeout and it may have confused the team B captain.
Basically, in the end team B got the better of the possible scenarios but the coach didn't understand. Then, even worse he read the rule book at halftime and told me that the only way the offensive team can have a untimed down is if they committed a loss of down foul. He TOTALLY read that one wrong which made my explanation all that more difficult.
Last edit: Thanks Theisey. Gosh I really screwed up the A's and B's on this post. Ugh!
[Edited by ljudge on Oct 15th, 2005 at 09:03 PM]
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