Hey guys! I’m pretty new to speed running but I’ve been playing retro bowl for quite some time. I’m curious to hear you’re ideas about a potential time save in getting the ball to the opponent as fast as possible. The strategy I’ve seen most commonly used is to force a turnover by throwing 4 passes out of bounds. I’ve been playing around with chucking the ball away to the defense for a quick interception. The big problems with this are the potential for the defense to drop the ball leading to an incomplete pass, or even an accidental catch by the offense. Another issue to consider is the unskipable interception text and forced clock runoff. In my experience it’s been significantly faster if I can land an interception vs throwing out of bounds (5 seconds vs 11 seconds). In fact I’m even able to reliably get under the 11 seconds required for throwing out of bounds even with 2 interception attempts. Obviously I don’t have a very large sample so I’m curious to hear everyone’s opinions.

Welcome! You're right, throwing an interception is faster than 4 throws out of bounds but I'm afraid there's even more problems with the method than you mentioned. You usually start out at the 30ish yardline and a forced int gives the other team a short field and the team is more likely to score which can make it hard to win when you have only a small number of possessions when speedrunning. Not only is it more difficult to win but it also slows the game with the cutscene afterwards as it only skips like 15 sec instead of 40 when the other team has a longer field usually. There are some instances where throwing a forced pick is good though but it's not very common. For example if you had the ball at the opponents 37 yardline and your up by 9 or more, instead of throwing it out of bounds causing the "4th down field foal" scene to show. You would throw an intentional int as it's faster and lacks a cutscene. The defense still has a long field which helps with the clock skipping faster and even if they do score your still leading. However the most efficient method usually is to throw it 3 times out of bounds, then punt to give the other team a longer field. The longer the field for the other team the more time you can click through usually.