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Originally Posted by JugglingReferee
Can you expand on this?
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Practically nothing to expand on. It's just the way they chose to wrote things for a while. 1925 & thereabouts the word "foul" was not being used in Canadian football generally for violations of the rules, but specifically to mean what would now be subsumed in offside pass. I've no idea why; rules makers get on these terminology kicks from time to time.
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I also made the point that since a handoff is all about ball position in Cdn ball (as everything is), the point of origin and point of termination of a handoff pass are always the same, due to the physical nature of releasing a ball when another has shared control with you. If the two points are always the same, there never really is a forward handoff, therefore never an illegal handoff. The definition needs to be cleaned up.
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Redefining this in terms of ball position instead of position of the players (which was originally judged by foot position) simplified things generally, but left this one meaningless.
You can try to "do the right thing" by figuring out what gives an unfair advantage and ruling that way, but that's a form of divination that I sometimes engage in but can't claim to be expert at. Since it doesn't directly advance the ball, I could say that all handoff passes are fair.
Or you could just fall back on the old rules by which the violation is on the part of the player who by body position is offside when playing the ball, if a thrown forward pass to that player would not have been legal under the circumstances.
Last I looked the NFL rules were "interesting" on this. The
motion used by the player handing the ball off determined whether it was a forward pass. But where/when does that motion start & end? If the player extends at the shoulders & elbows in front of him with the ball a distance, but then at the last split second pulls it back a little before the exchange occurs, do you judge it just by that last pull-back? It's as bad as or worse than the "tuck" rule!
Robert