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newusernamebcimdumb t1_iy27rhg wrote

There are 11 very large men on the other team trying to stop that from happening. The defensive line and linebackers would rock that small person into next year.

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Seared_Gibets t1_iy28aut wrote

I think the implication is that they'd be airborne. Literally throwing the whole person, not just the ball, over their heads.

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newusernamebcimdumb t1_iy28pv8 wrote

How far do they figure a person can be thrown and at what kind of launch angle? The defense will kill that man. Even if the person could get thrown decently far, how often will that weak person fumble the ball when they get railed by the defense?

Theoretically, what OP is proposing is legal. But there’s a reason why we don’t see it happen.

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JOEYisROCKhard t1_iy2atla wrote

Yeah, exactly. It's pretty obvious to anyone that has watched 5 minutes of American Football. This is basically a Looney tunes question.

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YellsAtGoats t1_iy2gyum wrote

Right? Let's say we recruit a "small person" (a clinical dwarf... even someone on the lower end of clinical dwarfism) onto a football team. Let's say that that's 65 pounds of man plus a few more pounds of helmet, shoulder pads, etc.. Well, even the very strongest of men isn't going to fling that other man very far.

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Seared_Gibets t1_iy3cgat wrote

Oh I agree!

It did make laugh pretty hard thinking about it being tried, sounds like something from an Adam Sandler movie 😂

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BurnOutBrighter6 t1_iy283uv wrote

When you bring the tiny guy onto the field, it would become obvious what you're about to do. And you only have 3 tries to add up to 10 yards gained. It would be very hard to average over 3 yards of forward progress past the line of scrimmage with the other team fully aware of what's coming and lining all their own big guys up front-and-center to block the flying little person (or interrupt the hammer-throw process, which would take a few seconds to set up after the snap).

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americancontrol t1_iy297ut wrote

Its an illegal play, otherwise this likely would be employed in short yardage situations to catapult players over the line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helping_the_runner

". . .but the runner shall not grasp a teammate and no other player of his team shall grasp, push, lift or charge into him to assist in gaining forward progress."

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GoForPapaPalpy t1_iy29wyq wrote

I mean that’s done all the time though. You have big push piles to help advance runners forward. Most notably on QB sneaks, but also on any play where the small forward progress matters

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dimonium_anonimo t1_iy2aa0w wrote

Holding is done on every play too, and that's against the rules. It's all about not getting caught. Plus, most of the push piles happen at the line of scrimmage whereas the runner starts behind. The offense is trying to push the defense back, not the runner forward... Mostly. If they waited to start pushing until the rubber was in front, the play would be over. So I think they can get away with a little bit of pulling the runner along with them. What I do know for sure is that vaulting off your teammates (and I think the word is such that being thrown by your teammate also counts) is very illegal, and very hard to hide.

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Diagonalizer t1_iy2antx wrote

You see one offensive player push a teammate forward all the time. It happens just about every time that a play is called dead due to forward progress and also on pretty much every QB sneak.

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CavediverNY t1_iy296hl wrote

I believe the NFL has a specific rule against doing something like this… Although to be fair I heard about that on another Reddit comment asking why football teams can’t get a 7 foot tall guy to hold up his arms and block field goals!

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