When can referees award a touchdown as a penalty? A palpably unfair analysis

There are two reasons NFL refs can award touchdowns as penalties. We almost saw one on Sunday.

Last September, I proposed a shrewd method of defeating the Philadelphia Eagles’ near-unstoppable tush-push: “Put the whole 53 man roster on the field on defense and keep taking the half the distance penalty until they agree to run a different play.” There’s seemingly no strategy which can stop the Eagles’ sheer strength in short-yardage situations; the only solution was to form a phalanx of linebackers, tight ends, centers, cornerbacks, and punters, massed together in hopes of resisting Jalen Hurts’ quads.

In Sunday’s NFC championship game, the Washington Commanders tried a similar strategy. As Philadelphia prepared to score its sixth of eight rushing touchdowns, Commanders linebacker Frankie Luvu leapt over the center, hoping to time the snap perfectly and disrupt the QB sneak in the backfield. Not a bad idea: Luvu had timed the Eagles’ snap count perfectly just a few minutes earlier, and Troy Polamalu blew up QB sneaks this way. Unfortunately Luvu failed, drawing a penalty for encroachment.

Then Luvu leapt and failed again, drawing another penalty. And then Commanders lineman Jonathan Allen committed a third encroachment foul. Each penalty moved the ball half the distance to the goal line, barely a punishment at all. It’s an example of Zeno’s Paradox, the famous mathematical treatise about half-the-distance-to-the-goal-line penalties argued by former Baylor and UAB quarterback Jacob Zeno.

Clearly, the Commanders had found a loophole: If they just kept committing encroachment, they would sacrifice mere inches while preventing the Eagles from actually running a play. Eventually, the Commanders be able to guess right and get a stop.

But then Shawn Hochuli took the microphone to make an unusual announcement. He said that if the Commanders committed another foul, he’d use his authority to give the Eagles a touchdown:

Hochuli’s tone and phrasing made it seem like he was making the whole thing up. Hochuli said he would act “if this type of behavior happens again,” sounding less like a referee with front-to-back knowledge of a phenomenally complex rulebook and more like a frustrated dad desperately seeking a moment of peace in a car full of children belting out the Moana 2 soundtrack.

But Hochuli was right. This specific scenario and penalty are outlined in the NFL rulebook… and the rulebook also grants referees the ability to award scores in infinite scenarios which haven’t yet been dreamed up. Here’s how and why football officials can reward a touchdown as a penalty¹ even when the ball doesn’t cross the goal line.

There are two reasons NFL refs can award touchdowns as penalties.

One reason a ref can award a touchdown is what the rulebook calls a “palpably unfair act.” What is a “palpably unfair act?” The rulebook says that it’s “any act which is palpably unfair.” Thanks, rulebook!

I almost admire the abstruse, near-poetic word choice. The rulebook is so precise that it specifies the exact shape of the ball—it’s a “prolate spheroid”—but when does unfairness become “palpable?”²

The vagueness is intentional. There are some specific examples listed of palpably unfair acts—an inactive player coming off the sideline to make the tackle, or a defender standing under the uprights and blocking a field goal—but the rule serves as a catch-all for anything not covered in the rulebook, allowing officials to make their own determinations for whether something that has never happened before is legal. The rule also empowers the officials to award a score, or “any such distance penalty as they consider equitable and irrespective of any other specified code penalty.” So basically, if something “palpably unfair” happens, whatever that means, the ref can do whatever they want. Sorry, Coach From The Movie Air Bud: your airtight logic about the rulebook’s lack of dog-related clauses is busted.³

In the same section of the rulebook as that totally abstract rule, the NFL also outlaws the specific situation that came up in Eagles-Commanders. It’s illegal for the defense to commit “successive or repeated fouls to prevent a score,” and “If the violation is repeated after a warning, the score involved is awarded to the offensive team.” I do think they could clean up the wording—aren’t all penalties by the defense made “to prevent a score?” But clearly, Hochuli nailed it. The Commanders repeated encroachments were exactly the scenario meant to be punished by this rule. He even remembered he had to give a warning before awarding a score.

So far as I can tell, Sunday’s game is the first time this rule has been cited in a game. There has never been a score awarded due to penalty, either due to the palpable unfairness clause or the repeated fouls clause. I’m willing to forgive Hochuli’s clumsy wording in a scenario that has never happened in a game before.

The same rules exist in college… where it has happened

The college rulebook contains both rules, but with more clarity in its wording. (Sorry, but you’re the NFL. Get an editor!) For one, the college rulebook uses the phrase “obviously unfair” instead of “palpably unfair,” presumably after an official spent too long looking at the dictionary trying to figure out whether a certain play was so illegal that he could literally feel it. The NCAA rulebook also specifies that a score can be awarded after repeated fouls “for which penalties can be enforced only by halving the distance to its goal line,” which is what the pro rule is trying to say while accidentally outlawing any fouls by the defense in any attempt to stop the opponent from scoring. As a writer, I have to commend the NCAA authors on their concise language and give a C-minus to the NFL rulebook—get your head out of your thesaurass and say what you actually mean!

English class over. Onto history. There are actually several instances of players leaping off the sideline to tackle players, which everybody agrees is unfair enough to reward the offense with a touchdown. The most notable instance came in the 1954 Cotton Bowl, when Rice was whooping Alabama—times have changed—and Alabama’s Tommy Lewis came onto the field to tackle Rice’s Dicky Maegle. Lewis later told press he was “too full of Alabama” to let Maegle score, a line paraphrased decades later by the man who poisoned Auburn’s trees. (Also palpably unfair.) Refs awarded the touchdown to Maegle.

This situation also happens in an iconic episode of Friday Night Lights, although the FNL screenwriters simply called it “coach interference” instead of giving a lecture about the “palpably unfair” clause.

Quirky Research has a full list of situations where college and pro officials have awarded scores as penalties for unfair acts, as well as scenarios when they probably should have. They’ve located exactly one instance of a “repeated penalties to prevent a score” scenario like the one we saw on Sunday. It happened in a 1951 game where a player for Toledo refused to stop committing penalties on an extra point attempt by Dayton, eventually leading to the official simply giving Dayton the point. The situation was hilariously pointless—Dayton was up 20-0 and kicking to make it 21-0, but one guy on Toledo simply wouldn’t let it happen. Congratulations to that Toledo player for being historically spiteful, the one player among the hundreds of thousands who have played at the college and pro levels to be this annoying.

But you can still be a little unfair.

Back in the 1980s, Eagles head coach Buddy Ryan (known to people my age as Rex and Rob’s father, known to people older than me as one of the greatest defensive minds in the sport’s history) had two Intentional Cheating plays in his playbook to be used at the end of games. One was called the Polish Punt Team. Ryan put 14 players on his punt unit to prevent a game-losing block or return and secure a win. He actually used this strategy in a 1989 game against the Vikings, and nobody noticed until months later, when he received a $3,500 fine from the league.

Another strategy was similar to the 53-men-on-the-field idea I proposed earlier. It was called the Polish Goalline, where Ryan’s defense would intentionally put 14 players on the defense for late-game goal line stands.⁴ His playbook explained the strategy:

“The opponent is inside the 5-yard line going in to score. There is less than 15 seconds left. We want to stop their offense from scoring and in the process, we want to run the clock down to where they have enough time for just one play. So, we will stop them, get penalized half the distance to the goal, but leave them with enough time to run one play. We will then go back to our regular goalline defense and stop them to win the game.”

We’ve established now that this is illegal. Not only does it break the rule about repeated fouls to prevent a score, it also violates an additional rule about “committing multiple fouls during the same down in an attempt to manipulate the game clock.” If a team does that, the official can reset the clock to the time from the initial snap.

But there’s still an exploitable logic here. No, you can’t commit multiple fouls in the same down to run down the clock. But surely, you can commit one–like when the Ravens intentionally committed about a dozen intentional holding violations to burn the last 12 seconds in a game against the Bengals, or when the Niners committed a bunch of defensive holding penalties to turn a potential touchdown opportunity into a field goal.

And no, you can’t commit multiple fouls to stop a score. But for the ref to award the opponent a touchdown, first, they have to warn you first. That means you get to cheat at least twice before the touchdown penalty is possible.In Washington’s case, they were able to commit three intentional fouls before Hochuli caught on and prevented them from a fourth.

The rulebook outlaws repeated cheating. It outlaws palpable unfairness. But that means still allows for some cheating. You can absolutely cheat once, if not twice.

Kansas City has two weeks before facing the tush push in the Super Bowl. That gives them two weeks to come up with form of unfairness that isn’t quite palpable. They probably can’t put all 53 guys on defense—that seems pretty palpable, IMO. But could they try 15 guys for a play or two? There’s only one way to find out.

1. Semantic note here: Every ref I’ve ever met has a pet peeve about the word “penalty.” Technically, a player cannot “commit a penalty.” Players commit fouls; the punishment for that foul is the penalty. For example: when a player commits a pass interference foul, the penalty is enforced at the spot of the foul. Most of the time I'll write “he got flagged for a penalty” like a normal person, but since this article is quite literally about penalty enforcement, I’m going to try to be accurate.

2. The rulebook goes on to state that if an “extraordinarily” unfair act takes place in a game, the Commissioner can reverse the outcome of the game or demand it be played over. You can determine which unfairnesses are merely palpable and which are extraordinary.

3. Also, putting a dog in an NFL game would almost certainly not provide a competitive advantage. It would be a bad idea even if the palpable unfairness clause didn’t exist.

4. I do not know, nor will I be speculating, why Ryan associated these concepts with the people of Poland.