American Inability to Use Common Sense is Perfectly Reflected in Our Forward Pass Rule
Our bespoke interpretation of what constitutes an illegal lateral says a lot about us.
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[I know bad things happen every day and if I was going to cite “at a time like this???” as a reason not to write about trivial things that interest me, I should probably just shut the newsletter down forever. That being said, it does feel weird to publish a silly football thing while a city is on fire and so many of your friends have been evacuated and your podcast partner’s sister’s house burned down. I don’t feel like I have anything all that important to contribute to the conversation about that just yet, but I did write this about a different fire a few years ago that burned down something I cared about. And here’s a good Longread about SoCal fires. “…an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil.”
But just so you know, I started writing this a few days ago before all the fire stuff happened, so it’s not like I was just out here cackling while the roof was on fire. Okay, preamble over.]
I was watching a lot of college football during the holiday break, as is my duty as an American. I still mostly enjoy football on TV, even as it has become increasingly difficult to watch these past few years as the ratio of commercials-to-actual game play ratchets inevitably upwards. I haven’t timed it but you’d swear it was 60/40 in favor of commercials. I constantly find myself doing the crossword on my phone to avoid some dumb bullshit about insurance and then something consequential happens before I’ve even realized the game is back on. This happens about five times a game these days. Everything about it is getting shittier but I’m too habituated to quit now, and that’s sort of the world in a nutshell.
I digress, but at some point during Ohio State’s blowout win over Oregon, there was a play that seemed to define everything idiotic about the collective American psyche. I can’t find video of it (incredible in this day and age), but suffice it to say, Oregon was playing from behind near the beginning of the fourth quarter. I think they were down 41-15 at the time. Oregon’s quarterback, Dillon Gabriel, took a snap, dropped back, didn’t see anyone open, and started scrambling for the first down. As he was about to get tackled, he tossed a lateral off to his right to his running back, Noah Whittington, who ran for a big chunk of yards and got the first down. Only, NOT SO FAST!
(*whistle*) (*official huddle*) (*replay*) (*five more minutes of bullshit and possibly another ad for Draft Kings*)
Turns out, Gabriel was past the line of scrimmage (that’s the place on the field where the play starts) at the time of the lateral (that’s when you toss the ball backwards). And while Whittington was clearly behind Gabriel, a replay showed that the ball had left Gabriel’s hand at the 21-yard line and hadn’t been received by Whittington until about a yard further. That meant that the ball was received ahead of where it was released! Ergo, it was ruled a forward pass beyond the line of scrimmage, and thus illegal. Play overturned!
To me this whole fiasco (or like 30 seconds of game time, whatever) is everything idiotic and self-defeating about American sports, and about the way we interpret rules in general. Everything written down in anodyne language, to be argued over in bad faith, while everyone willfully ignores the bigger picture of why any of this exists. It’s not about football, it’s about states’ rights! It’s about ethics in games journalism!
Laying all of my cards on the table here: I’m particularly biased about this from being an ex-college rugby player. It feels relevant to mention here, however, because rugby is a sport in which the forward pass is illegal at all times. In rugby, this rule is easily interpreted: if the player passing the ball is in front of the player catching it, it is not a forward pass. I mean… duh. As the Balkan Dad on Instagram likes to say, “use your brain!”
In rugby, the spot on the field from which the passer passes and the receiver catches is immaterial. Moreover, if every pass had to be litigated according to the fucking Newtonian laws of relative motion and subject to slow-motion replays, the sport of rugby probably wouldn’t exist at all.
Perhaps the idea of rugby not existing, to you, as an American, is no great loss. Fine. The thing is, strictly from an American football standpoint: it was a cool play! It made the game momentarily slightly more competitive! A player was rewarded for displaying creativity, improvisation, selflessness, and teamwork! Why would you not want something like that to exist? Out of deference to some arbitrary point of procedure and a precedent created by someone who misinterpreted the rule in the first place? I’m sorry to be hyperbolic, but this play is why they can’t forgive our student loans. Is it really so hard to cite “common sense?”
Rugby and American football both come from the same proto rugby/football sport. Rodger Sherman goes a bit into this in his great piece about the Fair Catch Kick:
In the same way our tailbone is this weird little nubbin that shows our species shares an evolutionary link with animals that have tails, the fair catch kick is a weird little caveat buried deep within the NFL rulebook that tells a story about our sport’s past.
American football is descended from rugby. It’s in an evolutionary family with a bunch of other “footballs” around the globe—Gaelic football, Australian Rules football, and so on and so forth.
To apply this history to the matter at hand, it’s clear that at some point, we Americans took a logical rule that made sense and was practical, and we lawyered it half to death. Now it sucks a fat donkey shit but no one has the balls to change it.
As BluSky user Paul Harvey initially responded when I made this same point over there, “Americans have a weird innate yearning for jurisprudence and it is perfectly expressed in football. For ever second of action, you get 10 of litigation.”
It’s true that you could make the case that basically the whole of American football is an absurdly lawyered-up version of the ancient “football” that begat rugby and all the other footballs. And certainly some good did come of that. The forward pass. Sack dances. Keanu Reeves’ huddle speech from The Replacements.
I’m not asking to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. We can keep “run through a motherfucker face.” I don’t think change requires imagining some fantastical utopia, either. Sometimes it just requires the ability to look around, see someone else doing something better than you, and saying “Hey, what if we tried some of that?”
I suppose it’s tough to tell Americans not to dream, defined as we are by the fact that at some point, most of our ancestors fell for a real estate scam. And suddenly, maybe being better requires not thinking of ourselves as the outlier, the loophole, the exception. But it’s getting tiresome watching the exceptional constantly be the enemy of the practical.
I have a real-life example of what you're talking about. I went to see a movie at the Mann's Chinese Theatre. We got there a little early, so my girlfriend (at the time) wanted to get a coffee. We buy one from the theatre's outside concession stand, walk around looking at the handprints and stars for a few minutes, and then go to enter the theatre. The guy at the door says, "No outside food or drinks." I explained that we bought the coffee from their concession, so it was okay. He says, "No outside food or drinks." I then thought maybe if I explained the WHY of the rule, he'd understand my point. He says, "Sorry, no outside food or drinks." So, in the end, we had to throw out the coffee we bought from them because of a rule that ensures people buy their food and drinks from them.
Bonus: We get to our seats, and I kid you not, two people sitting a couple of rows in front of us had a whole rotisserie chicken. The concession stand did not serve fully cooked birds.
There was a Roger Goodell profile a few years back where someone close to him explained that he had a chip on his shoulder about never becoming a lawyer, and so many things immediately made sense after that.