When a team punts, I always see someone in the WR position off to the side. He’s always blocking and tangled the guy opposite him as the kick is going off. Could a punter do a quick pass to that WR and get 15 yards for pass interference?
Unlikely. Usually, even if the contact continues while the ball is in the air, defensive contact that’s initiated before the ball is thrown in a situation where it’s not expected that the ball might be thrown won’t get flagged even if it’s technically pass interference.
Moreover, most of the time it’s the offensive player who initiates the contact. In this case, if he’s beyond the line of scrimmage, he can be flagged for offensive pass interference. If behind, no one will be flagged for PI on the play.
Not within the first five yards. By the time he gets beyond five yards you might already be sacked or outside the pocket. (Defenders are allowed to mug receivers when the QB breaks the pocket because for all the defenders know it could be a designed QB run and the WRs might be run-blocking you.)
Until the ball is in the air, that is.
Oldie but goodie:
Why isn’t spiking the ball intentional grounding?
Because it’s done to stop the clock (at the expense of a down), not to avoid a sack. It takes almost no time off the clock, too.
The long answer is that intentional grounding requires that the ball is grounded “to avoid a loss of yardage”. The shorter answer is that the rules specifically allow immediately spiking the ball.
Note: only from under center, not in a shotgun formation.
True in the NFL; in NCAA, the only requirement is that it is done immediately be the player that controls the snap, and the ball may not have touched the ground beforehand.
You wouldn’t want to do it from the shotgun, anyway. Wastes time.
Bumping these 2 questions to see if anyone has answers.
The backup center on many teams is one of the guards (the two guys on either side of the center), with a backup moving into the guard spot. You don’t often see centers pulling, so agility is less important for a center. Hiking the ball, especially into a shotgun situation, can be difficult to be consistent with.
As for qualities you look for: size, strength, and bulk are obvious. Other things you should have are balance, good hands, agility, and (somewhat surprisingly) intelligence. Centers and tackles have a higher Wonderlic average score than even QBs, and guards aren’t too far behind. Protection and blocking schemes are just as complicated as multiple passing routes.
Already answered, but this touches on something I’ve been mulling over lately.
I’ve always been struck by how the infield fly rule points to a flaw in the basic rules of baseball, necessitating a contrived patchwork rule ala infield fly. I’ve started noticing a lot more of these patchwork rules in the NFL lately, though they’ve been around forever.
In a nutshell, spiking the ball is a play with special status. Its only purpose is to address a fundamental flaw in the game. There’d basically never be a sack unless you put in the contrived intentional grounding rule, and once you do that you have to specifically exempt the not-contrived spiking the ball play.
The above-mentioned rule about no interference when the QB rolls out of the pocket (until the ball is in the air) I think is another contrivance that points to a flaw in the underlying structure of the game.
There are a couple more I thought of this weekend, but my mind’s going blank right now.
Some obvious examples of such rules in other sports would be basketball’s 24-second shot clock and the icing rule in hockey. Without the former, almost all basketball games would end 4-2 or 2-0; without the latter, sustained offense in hockey would be nearly impossible, and it’d be 1-0 every game.
In both cases the rules are meant to account for basic flaws in the structure of the game, though for very different reasons; in basketball there’s no other way to stop a team with a lead from just having a man hold on to the ball and stand still, while in hockey a lack of the icing rule would mean a team on defense could just perpetually sail the puck to the other end of the ice.
In baseball, you also have a rule against deliberately dropping a line drive with men on base (pretty similar to the infield fly rule, but different in that the fielder must actually drop the ball.)
During the last NBA season before the shot clock teams averaged 79 points per game.
Exactly, RickJay. Great examples. I wonder if the offside rule in soccer is another example. Not being a fan of the sport I really don’t know.
Oddly, punts are measured from the line of scrimmage, not the point of the kick. Usually the punter lines up 15 yards back, moves forward 4-5 yards to get the kick off, thus you can actually add 10 yards to the “official” punting distances. I guess there’s a logical reason for this, but it escapes me.
In both cases the distance the punter (and holder/placekicker) set up is a matter of geometry and time; in the former case you want to have enough room between yourself and the opposing kick rushers that you can get it off before they reach you (assuming competent blocking on the part of your guys), but without having to go so far back that you give away too many yards on the possession exchange.
For placekickers, as stated you need to be far enough back to elevate the ball above the “wall” in front of you, but not so far back that it’s too far away AND gives those pesky guys zipping in from the sides time to get to the kick. Maybe Usain Bolt could get to the ball in time, but they usually aren’t blocked because the special teams coach knows even the fastest football player can’t slant in in time to block it.
Now me, I’d use the likes of Yao Ming or Manute Bol strictly to block field goals and extra points-I think it would be worthwhile to burn a roster spot just for a specialist like that-but I guess the NFL might pass a rule against it or something (the “no fun league” strikes again).
I’m guessing punt distance is measured from the line of scrimmage because it makes sense from a field position point of view. For example, I punt from my 30, you take over at your 30, that’s a 40 yard change in field position. Thus a 40 yard punt. If we called that a 50 yard punt it could get unnecessarily confusing.
One could argue that a field goal is measured from the kick for exactly the same reason, since if you miss (outside the 20) the other team takes over from the spot of the kick, as opposed to the line of scrimmage. That wasn’t always the case, but even before they instituted that pro-offense rule you could say that a successful FG attempt had no bearing on where the next possession started, so why not give the kicker credit for the actual distance kicked.
In college for a missed FG the ball goes to the line of scrimmage, not the spot of the kick. The NFL changed the rule but college did not.
I suspect having a guy who’s just a foot (if that) taller than your tallest player wouldn’t make that much of a difference. So it probably isn’t worth burning the roster spot.
The purpose of the offside rule in soccer is the same as the offside rule in hockey; if you didn’t have that rule, every team would have one or two guys whose job it would be to never leave the other team’s net area, since they could stand there to accept a long pass a,d cherry-pick goals. Thenthe defensive team wouldhave no choice but to deploy at least an equal number of players to stay in their end to cover those guys. The inevitable result is that many players wouldn’t be involved in the play at any given time.
I’m not sure that is quite the same as your examples. It’s more a case of trying to protect the quality of play, whereas grounding/spiking and infield fly rules are clearly rules meant to cover for unintended consequences of OTHER rules.