Reporting Penalties
 

Everyone seems to do this differently. How do you report penalties to your white hat? What information do you give them? White hats: what information do you want?

Who, what, when, where.

And you should be able to describe what he did.

"He held him" is pretty lame. "He grabbed the back of the shoulder and turned him at the point of attack" is what you should be able to describe.

Result of the play is important. Beause the R is focused on the QB or kicker they often don't know the result of the play.

Is there any other way to do this? Now what you say in that "Who, What, Where and When" is up to the Referee. And the "When" for me is also includes the status or result of the play and clock status.

Peace

Who: Team and Number (If you can't get me a number then you didn't see enough of the play to throw a flag)
What: Foul (including distance penalty)
When: Before the pass, after the play, etc.
Where: Where did the foul happen and where is our enforcement spot.

Finally what is the clock status?

Foul -"holding"
Live or Dead
Offender - "21, green, offense"
Location- "At my flag" or "On the 20",

After the U and R talk, U and I will synch up our penalty distance

Gimme the number of the kid that fouled last. It doesn't help me start the enforcement process in my head, whereas all the other info does.

Make sure you (or someone) tells me the result of the play. If I'm doing my job of watching the kicker or passer, I'll likely have no clue it was intercepted, incomplete, touched by R and recovered by K, etc etc. Nothing hacks off a white hat more than his crew letting him give options and signals for an accepted penalty and only then does someone pipe up and say "Won't they want to decline that and keep the interception?"

You don't necessarily have to have thrown a flag to be in the conversation. You may have seen the ball tipped at the line so there is no Pass Int foul after all. You may be drawing my attention to the fact that time expired, so the Offensive captain may prefer to take the offside and an untimed down rather than the yards they made.

Are you a coach? Cause, quite frankly, I think only coaches believe this nonsense.

Unfortunately there are a lot of officials that believe in that crap too. Now sure why. For example if there is a facemask call there are people that believe we are supposed to know who specifically in the pile grabbed the mask when there might be multiple hands to determine between all the same color jerseys.

We worry too much about what coaches think.

Peace

I usually tell that R that Johnny interfered with Sam.

Canadian Mechanic
 

LOL In all seriousness:

CANADIAN MECHANIC:

We use CINS or TINS

Colour or Team, Infraction, Number, Status of the Play

Examples:

- "White, Holding, # 69, the play was an incomplete pass."
- "Black, No Yards - 15 yard variety, #20, the gain was 20."
- "Blue, Holding, #85, yards were gained, PBH is the B-40."
- "Defense, Offside, #11, the penalty will result in a first down*."

* The HL must know that the LS is past the halfway point along the chains.

You know, Jug, whenever I see you post the "Canadian Ruling" I can't help wondering what you guys are doing with that missing down from every series. Do you think they're like coupons or something, if you save enough of them we'll let you use them to buy something from us? :p

Our linesman always lets me know whether "five will get you one" or not when the box is close to the tape on the chain. It's routine for us and should be for all crews. Our linesman measures the chains for every game at every level and always puts fresh tape on the chain.

The only time I've ever wondered if there was a good way to use the chains to measure was when we had a PF on a play that ended just about 15 yards short of a first down. In the end I eyed it up and it appeared to get the first down by about half-a-yard and that's the way we rolled with it (although in the back of my head I wondered if everyone simply thought we enforced it as an AFD).

I don't have a strict reporting requirement for my crew -- I have preferences, though -- I really prefer they say "offense" or "defense" or "kicking team" or "receivers." I'm not fond of shirt colors. Personally, I don't care if I get a shirt number, although it's part of the sequence so we can get the number to the sideline. If the official doesn't have a number, but has a position, that's OK. Saying left tackle to me is better than giving the wrong number. Like Jeff said, if a hand comes up and twists a face mask and we don't get a number, it doesn't really bother me -- it's not like not getting the number doesn't mean the foul didn't exist.

I also prefer holding and DPI to be described (arm bar, hook and turn, tackle, bear hug) so we can take that information to the sideline.

In our games we have enough punts as it is. I could only imagine how many we'd have if we only had 3 downs.