Reddings guide illegal participation

[Welpe]

Originally Posted by ajmc

I'll apologize in advance and hope you won't take any offense at my suggesting that anyone who blindly agrees to enforce an interpretation that they are unable to rationally defend, explain or apply any logic or functional purpose related to the game of football to, seems somewhat ill equipped to render dependable judgments.

It's been done...over 13 pages now but not one of them has been good enough for you. Furthermore, you haven't offered any actual rebuttal but have simply dismissed them as being "dopey", "ridiculous" and not grounded in "common sense". Numerous people have offered black letter rules, interpretations from various sources and examples but you keep going back to "common sense". I think the burden of proof is upon you to provide some sort of concrete evidence to support your interpretation. General concepts of "common sense" are not good enough.

Why are you so reluctant to accept a very plain English phrase for its face value? Do you absolutely agree with every other rule in the book? If you don't agree with that this should be the rule, that's understandable, but explain to me how "is touching" can be read any other way than in the present tense?