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Originally Posted by RichMSN
It doesn't necessarily hold that the defender is going to get a sack on the play.
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Nor that a foul by the offense on any other kind of play prevented a certain tackle.
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Besides, if it's 2nd and 19 it makes sense for the defense to decline the penalty. If the player is brought down 9 yards behind the line of scrimmage, why tack a hold on top of it?
Finally, previous spot enforcement works well in the other codes. 1st and 26 just means a punt in most HS games. It's too punitive. I don't expect everyone to agree, certainly, but it's just something I've thought for some time.
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But would you believe that until about 40 yrs. ago even in the pros, the ordinary all-but-1 enforcement was used even on pass plays -- and that it was a 15 yard penalty? It wasn't uncommon for illegal use of hands to occur 5 yards behind the previous spot, resulting in repeating the down 20 yards back of the previous spot. (And there was a lot less legal use of the hands then.)
All repeat-the-down distance penalties involve some imagination about what would've happened absent the foul, and there is no justice. In the case mentioned above, eventually the rules makers decided that on an apparent pass play, if A1 hadn't held B1, A2 would've gotten off a not-quite-bad-enough-to-be-grounding incomplete pass, so that the previous spot would be the basis for enforcement.