Legal Pass or Not

[mrerrl]

Team A sends man in motion. The QB hands the ball in front to the man in motion. Runner stops and throws a halfback pass to the receiver after getting the ball.

[smileyh]

Originally Posted by mrerrl

Team A sends man in motion. The QB hands the ball in front to the man in motion. Runner stops and throws a halfback pass to the receiver after getting the ball.

Legal. A handoff is not a pass. I assume a halfback pass is some form of forward pass.

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[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by smileyh

Legal. A handoff is not a pass. I assume a halfback pass is some form of forward pass.

It's legal in major codes, but some of them (NFL, CFL, Football Canada) do define handing the ball as a pass. Those that do just make an exception so as not to count a forward handoff against the number of legal forward passes in a down.

[Texas Aggie]

NCAA: you can hand the ball off in any direction behind the line any number of times, and this does not remove the ability to throw a legal forward pass. There are some minor restrictions against handing off to interior linemen, but we won't go over that now. Teams now often "flip" the ball forward to a player coming in front of the QB and that IS a forward pass. I've called 2 illegal forward pass fouls this year in varsity games where that happened. Both coaches said, "they're supposed to hand the ball off; that's legal, right??"

Yes, sir.

[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.

[CT1]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

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.

You're kidding, right? How can a ball flipped forward (toward the opponent's end line) to a player coming in front of the passer be anything other than a forward pass?