[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by Texas Aggie

If they give up on the ball, how exactly am I supposed to know or rule that he could have caught it? The player obviously didn't think he could catch it.

First of all, that's not so obvious. The player may just have decided it's not worth his while to try to get a better outcome than the penalty would produce.

Why should I think he could have caught it?

Because, whether or not the player thought he could have caught it after being interfered with, that's not what the ruling is about. It's about whether he could have caught it if he had not been interfered with. How are you supposed to rule on that? Just apply general knowledge of human abilities. You don't have to decide whether he would have caught the ball -- nobody can figure that -- only whether the catch was possible.

Now, if he gets turned around by the contact or otherwise distracted, then this won't apply.

Why does he have to get entirely turned around or "distracted"? Why couldn't he have just been bumped off line or had his hands knocked away? If any of those things affected his ability to complete the pass (or to compete it in a more favorable position), why shouldn't they be penalized, regardless of how the interfered-with player acts afterward? And if the contact was not enough to affect his ability to catch the ball (or to catch it in a more favorable position), why are you even reaching for a flag?

There are no such exceptions in the rules that I am aware of on these sorts of calls. For DPI, there is a clear exception: uncatchable pass. Don't extrapolate one rule or one ruling to another completely different rule. DPI is a different rule entirely.

But your allowing a player's actions after the foul to determine whether a foul occurred (by affecting whether you consider the ball catchable) violates one of the fundamentals of fouls and penalties: that the penalty option is supposed to be based on play up to that time, not afterward.

Besides, your play example isn't even similar to what I'm talking about. In your play, the QB didn't "give up" on anything. Quite the opposite -- he ran the play CAUSING the penalty.

But you're saying that the player's continuing to attempt to catch the ball causes that penalty.

That's actually good football. A&M used to do this all the time when RC Slocum was coaching. Whenever the defense got into the NZ, the center would automatically snap, everyone else would hold their position, and the QB would usually kneel down. That's a free 5 yards and often a first down. Later, the QB coach realized that QB could sneak and pick up real yardage -- once I think they ran 25 yards or so for a TD as most of the defense froze and the rest had to chase.

Taking advantage of an opponent's error is NOT giving up on a play. That's silly.

It is giving up on the play to kneel down or spike the ball, when you consider what you wrote above about picking up real yardage! But you don't take away a penalty option because of how the offended side acts after the foul in that case, so why should you in the case of pass interference? "Catchable" refers to the condition of the pass had no interference occurred, not its condition with the interference.