Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert Goodman
What I'm having a problem with is your use of the word "late". To be any sort of contact against the passer, it has to be initiated while he doesn't have possession of the ball, or he wasn't a passer & hence couldn't've been roughed as a passer.
Is all you're saying that which type of foul & enforcement is deemed to have occurred depends on whether the personal foul was before or after he let go of the ball? Seems the simplest way to put it. Then it seems all Redding's saying is that if there's any doubt as to when the ball was released, rule that it was released before the foul.
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Robert, sorry for the confusion. "Late" may be misleading as I used it. The rule book verbage to describe "roughing" type contact on a passer is "avoidable" contact. Contact can be made after the ball is released that is still "legal." This happens all the time when we don't call "roughing" because the contact was not "late," it was not avoidable.
Example: If Passer A12 releases the ball in a legal forward pass and B55 contacts him let's say within a half step after the passer releases the ball and we would not have flagged it for "roughing" we now can flag it for roughing if the contact was of the PF type (as listed in 9,4,3) even though the contact was "unavoidable."
Here is a real life example that happened earlier this season.
A12 releases the ball and B99, a split second later, makes helmet to helmet contact with the passer. I correctly flagged this as "roughing." Prior to 2014 this would simply have been a PF for illegal helmet contact, not "roughing," because the contact was bang/bang, "unavoidable" (that is, ball released, contact made.) This "technical" distinction makes a difference in the enforcement: Roughing is auto first down and PF is not.
In a nutshell summary: Any contact on the passer that we judge to be a PF type contact (whether avoidable or not) we call "roughing."
Any clearer or more confusing?