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Now that I have looked at the Letterman video, the snap looks perfectly legal. It's just that the course of the play looks like the sort of thing that would tend to diminish the kids' trust in adults' control of the game, which is of course a bad thing and IMO should be illegal even if it's not clearly so under current rules. If they're playing by Fed rules, it at least looks arguably (and going by the narrator's description on the show, must be) illegal in that there seems to be communication with the bench that would lead the other team to believe the snap not to be imminent, team A not ready to play. But I don't like it even if the communication had occurred only after the ball was put in play.
But really, nothing wrong with the snap under USAn rules. I know of at least one play series from a set called the Power Wing where the ball is to be snapped like that to a fly man in motion.
History note: When Canadian football universally adopted the hand snap in (IIRC) 1923, they required it to be thrown, and not handed, between the legs, apparently because that's what they saw being done in the USA, even though American rules were not that restrictive. (I don't know whether the Burnside rules used by some Canadian teams earlier in the 20th Century were less restrictive about the snap; I suspect so, considering the variety of play in the USA at the time Burnside formulated them. American rules didn't even outlaw the kick forward to scrimmage the ball instead of snapping it until well after the Burnside rules were promulgated.) It was about a decade and a half before Canadian football legalized the hand-to-hand snap, but they never legalized snapping otherwise than between the legs.
Robert
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