Illegal Snap?
 

Had a couple youth games late Saturday. I guess in the game before me the referees were telling me there was a play where the center snapped the ball, but ran about sixty yards with it. One official thought the ball touched the QB's hands, while the other did not see a touch.

What are your thoughts on this??

Rule 7-2-4 a snap shall be such that the ball immediately leaves the hand or hands of the snapper and touches a backfield player or the ground before an A lineman touches it.
I guess the question here would be did the ball leave the snappers hand. My take would be if the snapper simply held on to the ball as it touched the QB hand, then we have a foul. This would be a snap infraction and the ball would remain dead.

Let's say the snap was legal and completed. The question then is, how did the ball get back into the snapper's possession? All the major codes now have provisions that require considerable rigmarole to do that, rather than the old play of simply handing the ball back to the snapper the way it came.

Robert

"Centre Sneak"
 

We've seen that play a bunch here lately...it's a real pain in the arse.

In Cdn. rules, it's covered under the "hand off pass" rule. To be legal, the player taking the "pass" cannot be occupying the position of a lineman.

Thus, for it to work, the QB would have to take the snap, take a step back a yard, then the centre would also have to take a step a yard back and THEN get the forward hand off pass. This centre's snap back to touch the QB's hands and then running off with it is Procedure, a 5 yard penalty.

That's a fair bit of choreography if you ask me...tough for the June Taylor Dancers to get that one right...much less a amateur football player....

One way or another you probably had a foul.
If the ball never left the snappers hand(s), it was an illegal snap.
If it left the snappers hand and if he did not turn around to face his own goal line and move 1 yd back, then when the QB gave the ball back to him it was illegal forward handing.
If it left his hand and the QB set the ball down for the snapper to pick up, it was a planned loose ball in the vicinity of the snapper.

Couldn't have said it better. They've made that play nearly impossible now. I'm guessing the stripes missed that.

They told me about the play when I got there, and I told them that I thought a legal snap had to leave the center's hand. I wasn't sure though, and gave them the 'wtf' look.

It does, in all codes.

BTW, in a discussion at Coach Huey's, I worked out the quickest combination of snapping the ball and returning the ball to the snapper's possession that I think would work in Fed rules. The snapper would do a spin with the ball akin to that of the QB in the fly (jet) series. This would accomplish a quick and continuous motion of the ball backwards. When the snapper had spun thru 180 degrees, the ball would be taken by a back who would immediately hand it back to the snapper, who could continue his spin.

Robert

:eek:
That would look pretty comical. He would probably get dizzy and fall down, looking like a j@ckA$$! The MLB would probably be laughing his butt off at the sight of such a move.

Picking the ball up and spinning with it to give it to someone standing directly behind the snapper is quick and continuous backward motion that immediately leaves his hand? Not in my world.

See, this is why officials need coaching experience and vice versa. Well, actually many coaches don't even know about full spin series.

We had a discussion of that here a year or more ago, and your world apparently wasn't shared by most of the others. If you followed the arc of the ball, it could be made to move backwards continuously up to the point where the other player takes it.

Robert

Oh. Well. Obviously if you say most of the people a couple years ago on this discussion board said it is ok then it must be legal. Yeah, right.

Why not review that discussion? It came up in the context of a "wrong ball" play, and somebody brought up whether the same snap (which was of an unusual style) would've been legal to start a play that didn't have the illegal aspect peculiar to "pretending not to be ready" types of plays. Various hypothetic forms of snap were described, including this one.

The key points are that "backward" in the description of the motion of the ball in the rule regarding snaps isn't confined to directly backward; "continuous" doesn't mean it has to be in a straight line, just unbroken by any movement which isn't backward at some angle; and that having the ball be taken from the snapper's hand or hands is a sufficient way for it to leave the snapper's possession.

And yeah, I know, it doesn't work under Canadian rules, which are much more restrictive on this point. So are some touch football rules.

Robert