The NFL Referee Can Award A Touchdown Nobody Scored

Scoring in football looks like a closed system. Someone carries the ball across a line, or catches it there, and points follow. The NFL rulebook keeps one exception, and it sits in plain sight at the bottom of the list of ways a touchdown is scored.

The last item on the list

Rule 8 enumerates how a touchdown is scored. After the entries about runners breaking the plane and loose balls recovered in the end zone, the final item reads: "The Referee awards a touchdown to a team that has been denied one by a palpably unfair act." No player has to do anything at all.

What a palpably unfair act is

Rule 12, Section 3, Article 4 defines it in one sentence: "A player or substitute shall not interfere with play by any act which is palpably unfair." The rulebook does not enumerate examples. It leaves the judgement with the officials.

The Referee may award a score.

The penalty is unusually open-ended. The offender may be disqualified. The Referee, after consulting the officiating crew, enforces any distance penalty the crew considers equitable - explicitly "irrespective of any other specified code penalty" - and may award a score. Most NFL penalties are a fixed number of yards. This one is whatever the crew decides is fair.

The second version, for repeated fouls

The same section carries a narrower cousin. Rule 12-3-2 says the defense shall not commit successive or repeated fouls to prevent a score. The penalty: if the violation is repeated after a warning, the score involved is awarded to the offensive team. That closes the obvious loophole - a defense simply fouling on every play at the goal line rather than allowing a touchdown.

• 01The offender may be disqualified
• 02The Referee enforces whatever distance penalty the crew considers equitable
• 03That enforcement overrides the otherwise specified code penalty
• 04The Referee may award a score

Why it exists

A rulebook built only on fixed penalties can be gamed by a team willing to accept them. If the worst outcome of interfering with a certain touchdown is fifteen yards, the interference becomes worth it. These two articles remove that arithmetic by letting the outcome exceed the penalty.