Receiving
While quarterbacks are mainly not a factor in terms of receiving forward passes, some trick plays, like the flea flicker, require quarterbacks to catch a lateral by a wide receiver or running back before delivering a forward pass. In the wildcat formation, a quarterback lines up as a flank receiver who can be used to catch a forward pass. Typically the quarterback is not thrown to in this formation, but serves as a decoy, as even the least mobile quarterbacks are capable of catching a ball for positive yardage. Occasionally, some backup quarterbacks may be used to receive long snaps as a holder for field goal or extra point attempts, as quarterbacks generally have good ball handling skills, and may have to become the passer in the event of a bad snap, an aborted kick attempt or a designed trick play.
Under NFL rules, if a quarterback lines up under center, he is by definition ineligible and not allowed to receive a forward pass. However, in college and high school ball, quarterbacks are eligible receivers (by a special exemption in the high school rule books) regardless of whether they are under center or in a shotgun formation. The NFL allows a quarterback in a shotgun formation to receive a forward pass.
Read more about this topic: Quarterbacks Coach
Famous quotes containing the word receiving:
“Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)