Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike L
I guess that's ok if you want to give all the benefit of the doubt to one team over the other.
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You have to remember that we are talking about cases in which we are not sure what the correct ruling is. In such cases, we try and use the principle of least harm or you could call it least difference.
If a player is near the sideline and we lose track of his feet for a instant we will not call him out of bounds unless we saw him touch out of bounds. In this case the least harm would be to give the benefit of the doubt to the runner.
If a player is near the goal line on a drive we will not award a TD unless we see the player break the plane. If we miss the breaking of the plane then we give the benefit of the doubt to the defense that the player did not break the plane.
If there is a potential block in the back but we missed seeing how the player got to that point then we will pass on throwing the flag and give the player the benefit of the doubt that there actions are legal.
There will be many examples of where we need to err one way or the other if we are not sure what happened. Some will favour the offense and some will favour the defense but I believe that we try to do the least harm with what we did not see or to put it another way, the least difference such as no foul, player still in bounds and no TD.