Pass attempt breaks the plane

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

That's all fine, but with 5 officials is there nobody likely to have a view down the goal line? How about with 4?

Say the R and U both were looking at the passer's feet as he threw, and got their beanbags very well spotted. Would anybody have been looking at the ball and the goal line? If they walk up to where the beanbags are, decide the forward pass was illegal, and then try to deduce the enforcement spot, is anybody likely to say the end of the run (where the ball was) was in the end zone? If they decide the pass was legal, then they're not even concerned with an enforcement spot.

It occurs to me now that if everybody -- quarterback, officials, onlookers -- was thinking "pass", then missing a call like this on the goal line is not such a big deal.

It also occurs to me that in NFL rules you wouldn't have anybody beanbagging the foot position of the passer, since there it's only about whether the ball has gone beyond the neutral zone before it was launched, so even if they didn't have the full NFL complement of officials, they probably wouldn't miss the ball's breaking the plane of the goal line.

Since the NFL, NCAA and Fed all started with the same rules committee after the forward pass came into the game, I wonder whether which one changed this determination of whether the pass is legal. It'd be interesting to know why.