Quote Originally Posted by Brian Nazareth View Post
I agree

Although I do remember the debate at the time (2007ish?) to do away with the enforcement of quick PTB's. There was talk about it making it too easy for attacking teams, so our halfbacks weren't developing ball-playing skills.

It's not exactly achieved the stated intention, has it?

Couldn't help thinking that it was at least partly in response to how successful we were at exploiting quick PTB's, and with Roby now emerged as such a quick and intelligent dummy-half and still with Cunningham in his pomp, it was like the powers-that-be got terrified we were going to dominate and sought to nullify us.

It worked.
I always though we went down the wrong path to slow the PTB down, by allowing lying on. All that was needed was to strictly enforce the PTB I.e.

Player must gain his feet (no hands on the ground)
Player must move the ball backwards with his foot

This would have slowed the PTB down enough