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Originally Posted by LeRoy
So with the ball on Team B's 6 yardline and the QB scambles back to the 50 and the tightend comes back to help him and he get's facemasked at the 49 yardline, then the pass is completed to the 48 yard line and the runner is downed there. Are we going back to the 5 yard line for the penatly enforcement? Because the tight end could have went out for a pass?
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I guess you're asking a question of game design philosophy. I could ask the related question in the case of no foul, are we going back to the B 6 yard line if an incomplete pass is thrown intended for the TE on the B 48, because the end could have gone downfield?
The NCAA made a decision a long time ago to treat unsuccessful forward pass plays differently from the usual progress of the ball. When the forward pass was first legalized, a forward pass that hit the ground before touching an eligible receiver of the passing team was a live ball that could be recovered and advanced by the opposing team; if it was recovered by the passing team, it was treated as an illegal forward pass and brought back to the spot of the pass. The rules makers decided they wanted to encourage forward passing more, and recognized that a player throwing a forward pass was forfeiting an opportunity to advance the ball from there by running (especially so when the pass had to originate at least 5 yards behind the previous spot), so in compensation for that "loss", they awarded the distance back to the previous spot in case of an incompletion. It was a while before they realized a runner could sometimes benefit from this generosity by deliberately throwing an incomplete forward pass during any play; I don't know how long before intentional grounding was outlawed. Anyway, a different view was taken for "pass plays" than for "running plays", with the idea that most "pass plays" would be so by design, and so would be subject to partly different rules, increasingly so over the years.
It certainly didn't have to be that way, and I'd like to see them go back, but in general that would tend to discourage the passing game compared to what it's become. But you shouldn't complain when rules are adopted that are consistent, and this penalty enforcement seems consistent with the "pass play" philosophy to me.
Robert