Re: [NFL] Colts-NE, Defensive Delay of Game?

   >> There was a time when some previous-spot and succeeding-spot
   >>penalties were  administered by moving both the spot and the
   >line-to-gain the same distance. >

   >That's very interesting, and it addresses the problems you point out
   >where the penalty varies in severity based on the situation.

It doesn't fix them entirely.  But the reason for that type of enforcement I
gather to have been philosophic more than anything else.

There are tactical fouls and non-tactical ones.  You can cheat or
accidentally infringe in such a way that enhances your side's yardage gain
or diminishes the other side's.  Clearly by doing so you're not only
affecting field position, but the situation of down & yards to go.

OTOH, you can cheat in a way that's just nasty (unsportsmanlike conduct) or
dangerous but may have little or no effect on field position or ball
possession.  They're the type of fouls you might like to penalize via, say,
a shock from a cattle prod or a spanking or some such that doesn't affect
the game, and it's always too bad that the game situation is affected by the
actual penalties.  So you could at least keep the down & distance the same
in those situations, and just move the ball.

I'm not saying the enforcement scheme actually broke down along exactly the
lines above, but I think you get the idea.  IIRC dead ball fouls moved the
line-to-gain.

   >It sounds so good, in fact, that I'm curious what the drawbacks are.
   >--Harold Buck

Basically administrative.  Someone had to hold the down marker stick to the
yardage chain while they moved in unison.  It also ever-so-slightly
lengthened the rules to have certain penalties written as "...the down and
distance to gain remaining the same".  I think this type of enforcement was
eliminated by some time in the 1940s at the latest.

BTW, in the 19th Century when downs & distance penalties were first
instituted, for a while it wasn't specifically stated what the down should
be after any penalty.  I gather that some refs interpreted it as starting a
new series after any penalty on either team.  The rules just referred to a
turnover after "3 consecutive downs & fairs", it not being made explicit
what "consecutive" meant.

And for a while it wasn't made clear that the required "advance" would start
a new series only as measured from dead ball spot to dead ball spot.
Probably some refs awarded a new series when the plane of the line-to-gain
was broken, even if the ball wound up dead behind the line to gain.

And ont the subject of things not being made explicit, as of ~20 yrs. ago
only the NFL of all major codes made clear that the default spot for the
next snap was the dead ball spot.  Have Fed & NCAA made that clear yet?  I
think that oversight was a holdover from waaaay back when the officials
didn't spot the ball.

Robert