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Originally Posted by mbcrowder
"ART. 1 . . . Passing the ball is throwing a ball that is in player possession. In a
pass, the ball travels in flight. "
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That's a definition. Statements of fact, not commands. No "must" needed there. If something meets those conditions, it's a pass, otherwise not.
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Sure. What's your point. Why is there any motivation by anyone here to call the OP an illegal snap?
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It's come up in actual cases, which is why coaches are discussing it.
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The rules basis for that is infinitely small, and doesn't seem (to me) to be the motivation of the rules writers.
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Hard for me to infer that.
Different codes have defined "pass" differently. In NFL & Canadian football, handing the ball is a type of pass, in NCAA & Fed not. "Fumble" could have been defined in its intuitive way, i.e. involuntary loss of possession, but that's not what the rules makers have done. I'm not sure why they wrote them in such a way that a rolling or sliding pass is not a "pass", nor is a leave pass, where the ball is left on the ground. The requirements for the snap went thru some alterations, with interesting differences between American & Canadian development.
I'd have to research the development of the definition of "pass" to see if it came after its inclusion in the snap requirements, as I suspect it did. If that's true, then banning the roll-all-the-way snap was a side effect of adopting that definition of pass. Similarly, the NCAA & NFL restrictions on advancing a fumble apply to certain cases that would not be so if you could roll or slide a backwards pass, or just let go of the ball wihtout a throwing motion and have it fall backward. Did they really want it to be illegal for a team to advance the ball by a desperation leave-the-ball-behind-you pass? Maybe yes, maybe no.