Legal Pass or Not

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by Texas Aggie

Teams now often "flip" the ball forward to a player coming in front of the QB and that IS a forward pass.

It may or may not be. The relative positions of the players as one crosses in front of the other is irrelevant to that determination. You have to see the ball at the time of its release and then again at the time it's next touched. And because NCAA defines a backward pass as one that's not forward, they built in a presumption (which would operate in cases where those facts are not known) that a pass is backward.