I was in my hand driven elevator and I heard two people talking about a snapperback. Judging from the short conversation I heard, it is some kind of ball game.
I looked it up in Google and found this
snapper–back: football center
But I’ve never heard of a football center referred to like this. Since the people were talking with an English accent, or it could’ve been Australian or something similar, I can’t tell the difference, but it was definitely in that line of accents.
So I thought maybe rugby? I googled this and came up with a book from 1878 that uses the term snapperback. But this old books indicates it’s a term from America football for center.
But again, it seems odd that if two English accented people were talking about a American football they’d use such an archaic term
Any clues of what they might’ve been talking about?
I don’t know but they specifically used the term “snapper-back” at least three times. Such as the snapper-back had the ball." and “He took the ball from the snapper-back.”
Were they talking about repeated errors by the “snapperback?” In last night’s American football game, the Cowboys’ center (as awldune noted, the player who performs the snap) botched it 4 or 5 times - there’s at least a reason to talk about him.
Agreed. I suppose that someone not familiar with American football might use the term to refer to a center (or long snapper), but it’s not a term I’ve ever heard before. Since the center isn’t actually a “back” (a term which is reserved for players who don’t start the play on the line of scrimmage; a center is a lineman), it’s a term which doesn’t really make sense in the context of the game.
It might make sense in a way. The Center does snap the ball backward to the QB. They could have been using the term ‘snapper-back’ to describe the action that the Center does rather then using ‘back’ in the sense of someone who plays off the line. Especially if they were not a follower of the game and did not know the proper terms.
