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Originally Posted by Ed Hickland
While I carry the books per regulation, it is my belief complex rules often require multiple rule citations something best done in a clinic.
Here are two situations that necessiated the rule book:
A on a field goal attempt. B11 standing inbounds jumps and tips the ball such that it goes over the goal post. Official disallowed the field goal incorrectly. Would the book have helped?
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If it's a
well-written rule book, such as Fed's ca. 1980, yes. If it's a badly written one such as NFL's or CFL's from around that time, no!
Obviously this isn't anything an official can do anything about. Rather, it's a criterion for judging how well a rule book is written. If the book is written well, you should be able to look anything up and get a definitive answer quickly. If it's not, you get into situations where you have to look thru the whole book, end to end, to see if a particular provision out-specifies a general one your eyes might've hit elsewhere.
In practice, what officials do with all but the best written rule books is to rearrange them in their heads. Even if the rule book is among the best written, I'm not saying you should actually refer to it during administration of a game, but that's the ideal that the
writers of the rules should aim for.
Robert