Pass Interference!

Um, yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a penalty. I’d give the benefit of the doubt and say he caught the ball, then lost it when he got hit…except the ball is in the exact same spot in panels 2 and 3, dangling as if from a string, with no swoosh marks to suggest that it ever reached the receiver’s hands. And TB is painstaking when it comes to swoosh marks: panel 1 is a clinic on how to throw a football a mile without bending your elbows.

12 thoughts on “Pass Interference!”

  1. Needs more puns.
    I generally like the artwork here, more fluid than the mannequins attempting sports action shots in Gil Thorp. But TB basically is stretching his thin, thin gruel of plotlines to fill his space everyday. He may as well just take a month off and run repeat strips like most modern strips do.

  2. So the only difference between the former starting QB & Jarod is that he can actually throw the ball….nothing else changed, no ability to catch, defend, block, run, kick.
    But at least now Jarod can find a dweeb girl from Big Walnut Tech and force her into the back of an SUV…later she will die of cancer.

  3. Yeah, that should be a penalty, but considering that we’ve already seen the demeanor of the referee who officiates these games..I’m guessing he’s too filled with ennui, broken dreams and Jim Beam to care about protecting players. And probably

    “Oh.. look an illegal hit…why bother, throwing the flag?…the kid should learn early that life isn’t fair… Like how I got laid off after 20 years at a dead end factory job….what time is it? When is this game over so I can drown myself in woodgrain alcohol?….God, I hate my life!”

  4. I suspect that’s not a football in panels 2 and 3. Rather, Jarod threw away the football in panel 1, so everyone could have a chance at a pinata filled with delicious chocolate-covered cancer. Of course, like the rest of the athletics covered in Funky Winkerbean, Tom Batiuk gets the pinata rules all wrong.

  5. A helpful reminder that Jarod’s teammates suck at football, in case you may have missed the last month-and-a-half’s worth of strips. Is “rereredundant” a word? And yeah, I’m fairly certain that delivering a spleen-destroying hit before the ball arrives is most likely going to draw a flag, unless that’s the whole point here, but that seems way too involved for FW. Time-killer-filler, never a good sign regarding things to come.

  6. Why is Jarod tossing a Raisinet to the guy on the opposing team in Panel 1? He’s barely 2 feet away; just hand it over to him, Bigshot!

  7. I’ll admit that I find the intricacies of the pass interference rule a little confusing sometimes, so I don’t really expect Batiuk (who thinks you throw a football the same way you do a frisbee) to accurately portray it.

  8. Diva, you don’t throw a frisbee that way. I don’t think you throw ANYTHING that way. As far as I can tell from the lines and the position of the arm in the first panel, he drew his right arm back, then brought it forward in a circular fashion to end over his head pointed to his left. Football isn’t my game, but just slowly trying that makes me think that no football should be moving in the direction it is when you move your arm that way.

  9. That football looks like it turned 90 degrees between panel 2 (front view) and panel 3 (side view).

  10. Absolutely pass interference. If Bull knows his stuff, he will deliver a tirade if there is no flag in tomorrow’s strip. But that throwing style, its more like wafting! How did he fire that bullet? Left arm across the chest, right arm reaching to the side? Posey’s style can be called “hanging the pinata.”

  11. This is actually a pretty good depiction of blatant pass interference for a comic strip, though it seems we all have our doubts about whether or not TB knows that.
    Perhaps this is supposed to depict Jarod leading his receiver across the middle into a head-hunting defensive back as a way of getting back at his unwelcoming teammates. That would be a lot more thought than TB has ever put into a football story.

    Given the fact that he has these teams playing with a Canadian football (NCAA and most high school footballs only have white stripes on half of the ball), I think our doubts are founded.

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