re: even though Bama got fricked by it, the forward pass rule...

This is how I feel about the rule. Say you're on the 50 yard line, you have to get the ball exactly 50 yards to break the plane and it to be counted as a TD. But on a play like this, you can have the ball past the LOS, as long as a part of your body is still behind the LOS. It makes the field shorter, although it's not that easy to pull off and you don't shorten it a whole lot.