If you could make one change

Yeah, I get that, but on the flip side a 10 yard penalty from LOS (and repeat the down) vs a 7-10 yard loss and loss of down (sack).  Doesn't seem like any type of punishment for offense.  Much better to just hold than it is give up the sack.  Not much incentive to not hold all the time and hope to get away with it.  

If we are going to talk about offensive holding as a spot foul being too punitive and a "drive killer" then I would submit that no defensive fouls should result in an automatic first down. Mark off the yardage and give a first down if it puts the ball past the sticks, otherwise play whatever the remaining yards to gain are, like the change that was made to DPI a few years ago.

Fumbling out of bounds should be a turnover, like it is in the end zone.

The only way I'd change the touchback rule would be if the offensive team couldn't score by recovering their own fumble for a TD. 

Missed that. Lotta stuff going on here. 

That's sort of how it started out, except instead of a giant consortium it was always a fairly small committee.

The history of this goes back to the 19th Century in both Britain and North America, where once rapid transportation (basically the railroads) became affordable to many, there was pressure to conform the great number of local versions of football to one that everybody could play together.  Clearly that wasn't going to happen, because there were preferences for different types of game, as we still see today in much of the world, but most of the local variants of football did die out.  There were various playing circuits formed, and then conventions and negotiations to try to consolidate further, which were partly successful.

Rugby "escaped" from Britain before it was standardized, and it became popular as one of the types of football played by the college students who started to organize teams for both intramural and extramural play in the USA.  It was not the most popular version of football in the geographic area where US intercollegiate football got off the ground; the most popular versions played by reg'lar folks in the Northeast are now extinct.  However, it caught on enough among the collegians that a committee representing those who wanted to regularize play decided to adopt rugby as their game.  By that time the game had been standardized by the Rugby Football Union in England, so this committee obtained a copy of their rules and in 1876 adopted them almost verbatim, superseding the variants that were being played in Canada and the USA.  However, they did not establish ties to the RFU and did not keep current with changes there after that point, but they did start to meet regularly.

Within a few years even those colleges that were not represented or had been outvoted on the Intercollegiate Football Association decided to adopt the rules committee's game, and this continued for a good number of years.  However, there were two periods when brief breakaways developed, resulting for a few seasons in 2 or 3 regional versions of the rules.  The differences were quickly patched up.  And that's the way it stood until well into the 20th Century, with one set of rules that everybody at all levels used, formulated by the Football Rules Committee, which got taken over by the NCAA.  I'm guessing -- just guessing on general principles because I have no sources -- that there were a few minor variants around in local high school leagues going into the 1930s.  6 man football was concocted independently, long before being absorbed by NFHS.  But it was only in the 1930s that the high schools and pros started formulating football rules for their own use, and even then they stayed close until the 1940s, and still pretty close for many decades after that.  It was only in the 1970s that NFL's rules started to diverge much faster from the others.

However, Federation football rules proved so popular that for a brief period around 1960 there was a Football Alliance formed by NFHS, the NAIA, and NJCAA to play by those rules instead of NCAA's.  NFHS still controlled their football rules committee, but started to take some input from those other organizations, formulating "Alliance Rules".  But it broke up after not long, and the Federation went back to formulating for high schools and youth.

In the 1970s the NCAA and NFHS formed a liaison committee to discuss working together on football rules -- not with the goal of converging their sets of rules, but for study and advisory purposes.  The liaison committee was dissolved in the 1980s, and since then it's seemed more like a rivalry encouraging petty differences.

In the early 21st Century there has been an effort to consolidate men's and women's minor league football rules into one widely used set by the United States Football Association -- the USFA, as opposed to NFL's front group, USAF.  In the late 20th Century there had been a proliferation of league playing rules in the minors, usually some cut-and-paste from the same or previous year's NFL, NCAA, and NFHS rules.  The USFA's effort was the first to try to get uniformity in their rules without forming into a single circuit for regular season or post-season play, as MPFA and later the AFA had been doing.

As far as I know, the International Federation for American Football has tried to get national football federations to play by contemporary NCAA rules.

Canadian football took a longer time to make their rules geographically uniform, largely because of different preferences in how they wanted to play the game. Once they did, they kept a single rules set shared by the amateurs and professionals until the CFL formed in the 1950s.  But then in the 1960s they went back to a single authority for both sets of rules until the CFL broke out their own rules again in the 1970s.  Divergence between Canadian amateur and professional football rules has been slow but accumulating.

Not only do I not like that on general principles, but it's going to introduce more close calls.  There'd still be just as many close calls over whether a player recovered the ball before it went out of bounds, but add new ones over whether a player fumbled before going out of bounds.  And it'll add an incentive for defenders to touch ground out of bounds while touching the ball near a sideline, and that too will often be a close call.

Meanwhile a hold on a passing play is only 10 yards from the LOS...without that hold 5 yards in the backfield the play would sometimes be a loss of 12+ yards.

great post, thank you

I think that that's why Virginia changed their off-season rules. I think that football coaches saw that all of the other sports had ways to practice in the off-season so they asked, "Why not us?". They can practice football now and I'm sure more than a few of them regret it. 

As long as we're on the subject, something I brought up in the thread leads to another change I'd like.

I like the scoring they use in archery, not in darts. It rubs me wrong that sometimes you can benefit by doing the opposite of what usually benefits you. I dislike your being penalized for getting close to your target. Say it's your 4th down, and you lose yardage back to your 10 yard line. That's bad. If you lose back to your 5, that's worse. If you lose to your 1 yard line, that's the worst. But if you lose yardage to your goal line or behind it, in most cases that's not as bad. WTF?

I wrote upthread that there were some situations where today a safety applies but long ago it would've been a touchdown. So how about any time you turn over the ball, whether on downs or by a kick, and the spot is behind your goal line, we make that a touchdown? If you're not turning the ball over, still a safety.

Not in the same spirit, and not even that it's any big deal to me, but anybody here know why they practically outlawed the planned loose ball play in the vicinity of the snapper -- like the Hugo special and the fumblerooski? Was it because officials were getting faked out?

Allow QBs to throw the ball away outside the pocket.

One NFHS rule that I would like to see changed bit us this spring "season". I have actually never heard of this but asked a white hat friend of mine from another state and he confirmed it.

We were called for defensive pass interference on a pass play where the receiver who was interfered with caught the ball for a touchdown. Per NFHS rules, the touchdown play stands and the 15 yard penalty is enforced on the kickoff. I asked my white hat friend if the ball was just caught in the field of play, would the penalty be tacked on at the end and he confirmed it would.

Totally weird to me. Seems like the defense gets penalized twice (allowing the play to stand AND getting the penalty yardage). The better rule would be to allow the offense to choose the result of the play OR the penalty like what is done at the college and pro level.

The Fed provision you bring up is weird in that it seems inconsistent with their other principles of interference penalty enforcement.  I could understand it if DPI were penalized like most live ball contact fouls, i.e. end of the run (which is the basic spot in that situation), and say if the run ends at the goal line it then carries over to the kickoff or try.  But that's not the way DPI is enforced in the field of play.  The foul by the defense during a TD scoring play is an enforcement provision for all fouls, not just interference, but it's incongruous with the way pass interference is usually penalized now.

Not only that, but it encourages a defender who's already committed pass interference in or near the end zone during that down to turn it into a personal foul by really teeing off on that receiver to make sure the pass is not completed, because the penalty will be less, even if the rare double penalty (which would probably be half the distance, then another half of the remaining distance, i.e. 3/4 of the distance from the previous spot) were incurred.

This is one of the reasons I think a TD should be awarded for DPI in the end zone.  And no "extra", even if the pass is completed.  In the 1940s (maybe the late 1930s) in the proceedings of the Fed football rules committee there were these essays by the secretary about consideration they were making of serious departures from the existing rules committee (which was by that time NCAA's).  One of the things he thought to be at least possibly bogus was the spotting of the ball at the 1 yard line for interference in the end zone.  He said this was adopted at a time scoring was particularly low, and touchdowns being hard to come by, NCAA's rules committee was reluctant to award touchdowns as penalties.  But since scoring had increased, he thought it was time to revisit that reluctance, at least for Fed.  Many of the changes that were mused on by Fed at that time were adopted within a few years, but not this one.  NCAA wound up going the opposite direction and moved the spot to the 2!  (The pros kept it at the 1.)  Fed wound up eventually going to previous spot enforcement without exceptions -- which it had been in the college rules a long time previously, and now is again but with exceptions.