Quote:
|
Originally Posted by HossHumard
"CFL was last to completely get rid of penalty horns, after CAFA, and long after USA officials."
Geez, I remember those stupid horns as a player....they sounded more like kazoos more than anything....I found them to be a big pain in the butt.
I can't imagine how a mid play signal like that could help the officiating process, but maybe some of you, um, ah..."vets" could shed some light on that!
|
There are
theoretic reasons for the penalty horn, which was used from an early time in North American football on both sides of the border, but not back to when the ref was the only official. Maybe it came in with the 20th Century, I'm not sure.
When the defense (especially) commits a foul, it benefits the non-offending team to know the remainder of the play is "free", so they don't have to play conservatively. They might not see a flag or other visual, but they can all hear a horn (unless they're deaf). It would've been of greater benefit in such a case to have 2 different tones of horn, one for fouls by each team, but
AFAIK it never got that sophisticated.
The other theoretic reason would be a situation in which the enforcement spot is Point Ball Held (which
AFAIK has been used only in Canadian football) and the spot of the foul is elsewhere. One official seeing the infraction can sound the horn while another official hearing it marks PBH. However, I don't know if there's ever been such a situation (it doesn't currently come up in Canadian football), and of course there'll always be a bit of delay between seeing the infraction and blowing the horn.
The trouble has always been that players have tended to react to an official's audible signal of any kind by stopping play.
BTW, until pretty recently in Canadian football (I forgot who had it last, CFL or Football Canada -- or maybe it's still there), it was still theoretically possible for officials to whistle a play dead following an infraction if further play by the team in possession would be futile (because the penalty would be enforced from a spot already determined), but officials just stopped using that judgement. (The way the rule was written was poor in that it allowed play to be killed if further play would clearly not benefit the non-offending side, but if you think about play situations you see what a hosing that could be! So instead I'm giving the obvious spirit of the rule.) It was a version of rugby's "advantage law", and was abolished in USAn football much, much earlier. It is kind of rotten, though, that injuries, offsetting fouls, and just plain blunders can be made by players during an interval when play is futile because it will be canceled by penalty.
Robert