Translation issues

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by zys

A.R. 7-3-8-XIX states:

On a legal forward pass beyond the neutral zone, A80 and B60 are attempting to catch the pass thrown to A80’s position. A14, who is not attempting to catch the pass, blocks B65 downfield, either before the pass is thrown or while the uncatchable pass is in flight. RULING: Team A foul, offensive pass interference. Penalty—15 yards from the previous spot.

Why is this a foul if the pass was not catchable by B65 or hadn´t been thrown?

They wanted to keep the rule fairly simple, so blocking downfield by A is prohibited until the pass is thrown beyond the neutral zone, if a pass is then thrown beyond the neutral zone. Another way of putting it is that it's illegal to throw a pass beyond the neutral zone if during that down a player of A has already blocked beyond the neutral zone -- but they didn't write it that way because they wanted the foul to be by the blocker rather than its being an illegal pass. There are certain advantages of compactness of language by making this part of the provisions on pass interference rather than the legality of the pass.

This might be one of the things you might consider changing for your country once you have the translation completed. Maybe it would be simpler to consider the pass to be the violation in that case, and to penalize it by making it incomplete. But you must consider now that there's no loss of down with the offensive pass interference, the loss of down incurred by making it an illegal forward pass might be a more severe penalty in some cases than the distance with down repeated.

Robert in the Bronx