OSU-Central Michigan finish

[Rich]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

No, it's not. CT1 got it right. IG can occur only when a passer tries to prevent a loss of field position (between being down there and the previous spot) or of time in the period. You can throw the ball to a space with no receivers if you're not doing so intentionally for either purpose -- I gave the example above of a cross-up regarding the receiver's route. I've seen plenty of passes like that that were correctly not flagged for that reason. If this weren't the case, those "to conserve" provisions wouldn't've been written into paras. f-h.

Letter of the rule vs spirit. It's grounding by the spirit. I'd flag this every time.

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by Rich

Letter of the rule vs spirit. It's grounding by the spirit. I'd flag this every time.

No, it's completely against the spirit of IG. The IG provisions were there just to keep teams from taking unfair advantage of the rules on incomplete forward passes that give you back the previous spot & stop the clock. This is a play that would've worked just as well had it been a backward pass.

Maybe what there should be is a rule specifically to keep a team from using up a few extra secs. by throwing the ball high in the air and/or far out of bounds, but there isn't any right now.

[BoomerSooner]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

Maybe what there should be is a rule specifically to keep a team from using up a few extra secs. by throwing the ball high in the air and/or far out of bounds, but there isn't any right now.

I thought about this, but the only down where this would ever be an issue is 4th down as it was in this game. I think adding a rule to somehow make what OSU did a penalty that would include an untimed down is unnecessary because there are other methods of burning 4 seconds from the clock on 4th down. Unless the offense is taking the snap inside the 5 yard line, a QB can usually run around for 4 seconds and just slide down. With a 3 point lead, the OSU QB could have ran the 40 yard dash through the back of the end zone and taken a safety. I'm confident he's not running a sub-4 second 40, and I think between the head start he would have had and even minimal blocking, he would have won that race.