Legal Pass or Not

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by CT1

Well, I'm just a poor dumb WH, but I can tell you that nobody -- NOBODY -- involved (offense, defense, peanut vendor) wants such a pass to be anything but forward. And I don't know of any official who would make such a technical distinction on the field.

You think the defense doesn't want a shot at recovery if it's muffed?

This is a serious point of trade-off in coaching. There are choices in how to run jet series, trading off deception & speed vs. ease of execution. A high speed handoff like that is hard to execute securely. In discussion at coaching sites, some say to make it a pass, which might actually be easier for some receivers to control, and in addition they want it to be an incomplete forward pass if they don't. But the farther in advance of the receiver's getting it does the ball need to be released, so the longer it hangs in the air & the easier it is for the defense to see the ball's been exchanged rather than being kept. So the coaches advocating this would like to get as much benefit as possible of its being a forward pass, plus as un-obvious a pass as they can get. This may result in the ball's barely getting off the passer's hands slightly into the air.

I'm sorry, but if you want the ball to barely move & yet to be a forward pass, you'd better make sure it doesn't just go straight up when it leaves your hands, but actually forward. Otherwise the officials are making this easier for the offense than it should be.

However, I was wrong about NCAA & Fed each building in a presumption that a pass is backward. NCAA defines a backward pass by exclusion, which by itself makes for a presumption in its favor. However, then NCAA added, "When in question a pass thrown in or behind the neutral zone is forward rather than a backward pass." So now the presumption in NCAA is in favor of the forward pass. Meanwhile Fed defines forward & backward passes separately by the initial direction of the ball, so Fed has no presumption of either in case of doubt.