But I checked it (easy, just try to resign a game with contact and with no checkers in the opponent's home board, then don't confirm the resign), and you were right, only a gammon is awarded in that case. Somehow my memory played a trick on me, sorry for confusing the debate.
Now it is also true that it seems near to impossible to think of a position with no checkers in the opp's board, where one would be better off resigning a gammon. But IMHO the possibility to do so is still a conceptual bug. And indeed, here is a somewhat contrived situation where it can turn into an exploit :
Triple gammon tournament, there is only one game left to play between the leader and the second. The leader is 4 points ahead of the second, so that he wins the tournament unless he loses a backgammon. To avoid that, he manages to leave the opponent's home board, resigns and wins the tournament. That's wrong.
nabla: I would discount Triple Gammon anyway as it is a flawed format given that timeouts and resignation have such an impact. Resignation of Triple Gammon matches simply should not be permitted. I don't know what the solution for timeouts is but they can royally screw it up as well. It would be better if there was some way to prevent them or score them fairly.
've no doubt that there are exploits in regular backgammon matches. But even if one were to occur in a tourney final, I still maintain that the excessive potential backgammons would far outweigh the missing actual backgammons.
I think that both ways of doing it are less than conceptual clean but the gammon one is fairer overall in terms of matching unresigned outcomes.