Quote:
Originally Posted by bisonlj
And it's not always easy to determine who said "shift" or "go". Unless you are watching the QB's mouth (which nobody should be doing), you can't tell if it's coming from him or one of the defenders.
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Of course. So now tell me how adopting reserved words for either team would make the "disconcerting signals" call any harder than it is now. True, it doesn't make it easier for you to tell who's saying what, but it shouldn't make it any harder, either.
Did you think I was proposing making this a strict liability thing where any utterance of the word at any volume by the wrong team would be a foul? If so, sorry; I meant it only as a way to clarify situations where they were talking loudly enough to make confusion a possibility.
My suggestion doesn't come from nowhere. I'd read decades ago of a convention supposedly adopted in Ivy League football where the defense was allowed to say only "move" at the line. I don't know whether that was an unenforced agreement between teams, or an interpretation the officials in league games were supposed to use in making a "disconcerting signals" call.
Robert