Illegal forward pass?

[jdmara]

Disclaimer: I am not a football official nor do I play one on tv. I did not stay at a holiday inn express last night...etc

I help out an officiating colleague every winter with his college intramural program at the University with basketball. I get out and officiate with the college students and try to get them interested in doing middle/high school officiating the following year. It's be a pretty sucessful partnership, if you ask me.

Well, this fall I decided I would try my hand at flag football although it had been a good 5-6 years since I last did a game in college. It's been an interesting learning curve to re-learn everything that I tried to forget since college, this wasn't my favorite sport in college intramurals. We had the following situation the other night:

QB A1 is flushed out of the pocket by the defenders. A1 crosses the line of scrimmage during his scramble and then retreats behind the LOS to avoid another defender. QB then completes a forward pass with both feet clearly behind the LOS.

It must be noted that this play is LEGAL in flag football. As long as this is the first forward pass of the down, this play is absolutely, by rule, a legal forward pass. No infractions have been committed.

While talking with my colleague, he was unsure of the legality of this play in "real" football. He believes that this is illegal in all football levels (NFHS, NCAA, NFL) but I wanted to check with you all. Thanks for humoring my post

-Josh