Conservation of momentum trumps it. Plus there are plenty of forces acting on the ball - gravity, air resistance, the impetus given to it by the player's throw, etc.

If the player's momentum changes [iafter[/i he's released the ball then clearly that has no effect on the ball as at that point they're two separate systems. Sort of. Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

Do you know I was wondering that - talk about a post where there are so many 'I will have the last word geeks'
by the way all A FORWARD PASS IS A FORWARD PASS.

Do I get marks if I show my working out?

Now we're getting into the difficult stuff, and TBH a full discussion of conservation of momentum in open and closed systems is probably way too far OT for this board. Basically the answer is 'yes' but in practical terms the difference would be too small to be observable.

so in other words if fatty Murrell was to chuck the ball forwards three metres to craig hall then its ok

Haha, OK I can see it's getting way too complex for others to keep up (hence the sarcastic remarks) so I'll leave it at that. My understanding of it (obviously on a less complicated scale to yours) is that regardless of the sum total of the momentum of the body it would go at the same rate after release due to constant velocity and not because of the weight (so if fatty Murrell passed a ball and skinny Hall passed a ball and were both running at the same speed, the ball would travel forward at the same rate regardless of Murrell's obesity). If there's more to it than that, it's never been explained to me which is why I wanted to know. Happy to be proven wrong as long as I know why!

now you have added another issue to the first issue and that is has fatty murrell ever been been mentioned in a sentence where he was described to have velocity and momentum

Why would we have 2 balls on the pitch, surely thats more cheating

It does beg the question, of how the game managed to survive on both sides of the world for 100+ years without using words like relativity, physics, momentum, perpendicular etc.

Are we just confusing things for the sake of it?

The same goes for obstruction. I played for 25 years, only finishing 18 months ago, and I dont understand the obstruction rule anymore. Even when it goes to the video, I still dont get it. Take Scott Taylors try on Friday night. In all the time that I played that would have been crossing because he took the ball before he went behind his own man. All this talk about "bad choices" by defenders is rubbish.

If its crossing its crossing. The same as if goes forward, its forward!

Alright Grandad, put your slippers on and calm down

Nobody's confusing anything. The forward pass Law is the same now as it always has been. The only thing that's changed is that idiot Stevo and his 'momentum rule'. And the fact that forward passes don't seem to be policed as well as they used to be, which means they get talked about more.