Roughing the QB or illegal helmet contact

[MD Longhorn]

Originally Posted by ajmc

It's really not our purpose to decide which penalty is more, or less, appropriate for a specific action, rather our role is to assess the appropriate penalty that fits the actual violation.

You're right that it's not our purpose to decide which is more or less... it's our purpose to rule on what actually occurred and penalize as we're told. You're advocating the opposite.

The difference here is that the hit occurred at some moment where it was LEGAL to hit the passer. But since there was HTH contact, we must penalize the HTH. We should not penalize more than HTH by calling this RTP. The foul does not fit the description of RTP. The ONLY illegal act by the defender was the HTH - and his team should be penalized accordingly. Anything else is putting your personal feelings of fairness ahead of the rulebook. If the rulesmakers wanted this to be penalized as RTP, they would have put it there.