Quote:
Originally Posted by Ragnar
I was unaware. Probably because of a college football game I watched long ago. In that game an OG went out into the flat. The QB bounce passed it to him. I remember mistakenly thinking the QB did that on purpose so it would be recorded as a fumble recovery, not a pass. But apparently he could have hit the G in the chest as long as it was backwards.
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Yeah there’s a really specific run in college about advancing on fumbles. I’m the NFL you just can’t fumble forward on purpose, a clause that was added after the Holy Roller play of the 1970s. But yeah either way you can lateral all you want; it’s sort of a throwback to the beginnings of the game when you weren’t supposed to throw it forward at all or, for a little bit, there was a limitation as to how far forward you could throw it on an actual grid that was laid out on the field (I believe the origin of the term “gridiron”).
It’s also sometimes one of those things like the drop kick or the fair catch kick that is easy to forget still exists because nobody has used it regularly for years. In the case of laterals, though, they’re basically what you see on pitch plays, flea flickers, and the hook and ladder play (not to mention the whole deal where a team will just start lateraling the ball at the end of a game in a last ditch effort to score).