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Originally Posted by JugglingReferee
Robert, you are well versed in football history and its variances; any comments?
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There've been a few philosophies at work across the codes over many years, and because they can't all work without contradiction in all cases, some have been supreme over others at times.
One philosophy is that if over the course of a "play", both teams foul, the play should be simply canceled, because they're not really playing football. But there've been a couple of philosophies about what constitutes a "play" for that purpose; it can be a down, i.e. the entire action from when the ball is put in play until it becomes dead; or it can extend from the time a team gains possession of the ball until they lose it. I remember the NY Giants having gotten a royal screwing once on a CoP down when one team's foul preceded an interception and the other's followed it, though I don't remember which team fouled when.
Another philosophy is that a major foul (affecting primarily safety or sportsmanship rather than or in addition to tactics) should not be canceled, or not completely offset by, a minor one. One remedy is to apply both and "balance" them; another is to ignore the minor one. But in either such case, something must be done when the enforcement spots are different, and then it's back to the question above. "Point possession gained" can be considered a mini-version of "previous spot" (PLS) if you take that leg.
The "clean hands" philosophy can be considered the "chronologic" one, applying enforcement options in the order in which live ball fouls occurred. It takes into account that the commission of an infraction changes subsequent play, and that the later foul may not even have occurred had it not been for a previous one by the opposing team during the down. However, none of the North American codes seem to want to apply this philosophy to situations not involving change of possession, which would often have to involve fouls by opposing teams in very close time proximity to each other, and which may have been detected by different officials. One thing CoP does is provide a time buffer between fouls, making it easy to tell which applicable foul occurred during which interval.
If you look at the most recent thread in the rugby section of this board, you'll see I'd asked the very question here of the intersection of the "order of events" and "minor-major" fouls. In rugby play is allowed to proceed after an infraction only as long as necessary to see whether the non-offending side gains an advantage (in which case there's no penalty), but if during that interval that side fouls too, play is whistled dead and the penalty for the first infraction applied. So I asked, do they in effect get a "free shot"? The answer is, yes they do, unless it's sufficiently nasty to draw a DQ or sin binning.
If you were hoping I could recount a chronology of the sorting out of these details by the various codes over time, forget it!
Robert