snapper protection

[mbyron]

Originally Posted by bisonlj

I got into a debate on another forum about this. I'm not going to have time to judge if the QB is 7 yards or 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage to determine if the snapper has protection. The intent of this rule is to protect the long snapper on a scrimmage kick (thus the term scrimmage kick formation). Anything else he's on his own. I'm sure others will disagree and that's fine. This is just one where I go with the spirit of the rule rather than the letter of the rule.

Without making time to check whether the offense is in scrimmage kick formation, you can't know whether the snapper is protected, so you can't enforce that rule. That's bad.

The spirit of the rule is to protect the snapper, who could be at risk no matter who receives the snap: how exactly are you allowing violations of the letter of this rule and yet observing the spirit?