re: Pitt QB Kenny Pickett fakes the slide and takes one to the house

You don’t have to “immediately lay off”. You can still touch and land on a sliding QB. You just can’t annihilate him. Those defenders should have still been moving to touch the QB.

If you're going to penalize defenders for not making super human efforts to somehow avoid hitting the QB when he decides at the last possible moment to slide (as is often the case), then you can't allow QB's to fake slide. The defenders are expected to check up, as I mentioned, in often unreasonable time frames, and so they are trained to pull up as soon as they see any sign of a slide coming.

But then if you outlaw fake sliding, it creates a gray area where referees have to decide what constitutes the beginning of a slide, and we don't need more gray areas in football. The easiest solution is to get rid of the slide, and just make it clear that the QB runs at his own risk, and maybe they won't run so much.

But since that will probably never be accepted, I see no other real solution to the problem.

Edit- I should add that referees already DO have to decide WHEN the beginning of a slide occurs, to determine whether the defender should be penalized, but that's on plays where we know the QB does, in fact, slide. In the case of fake slides, we might see stop and go moves, similar to the one in this video, that could be construed as a fake slide, and that's where the real gray area comes in and starts bogging things down.

Glad dude made Pitt relevant again. By all means exploit the rules.

Flexing in the end zone made it lame.

There’s no rule against it…