Here's a picture of me sweeping the non rooted leg
From let to right.
Frame 1: The front leg is rooted.
Frame 2: The front leg is no longer rooted (View the shadow differences that the heel makes.
Frame 3: The front leg begins to move at this moment the majority of his weight is on his back leg.
Had I swept his weighted leg his body position would have changed dramatically, but in the photos you can clearly see that it hasn't. He was actually able to stay rooted on that leg right up until the point that front leg crossed his rooted leg.
Sorry about the bad quality of this next picture (below)
The first picture shows me sweeping his unrooted leg. He lifts his leg to avoid a low sweep. In this picture the goal wasn't to seep the rooted leg because it would have caused injury, so I swept the unrooted leg. My opponent was expecting my leg to pass under his in which he could plant the unrooted leg. The problem is he's not able to because I'm redirecting that unrooted leg with my sweep. As you can see he's about to hit the ground and he would have had I actually did the sweep with any force. The sweep wasn't even fast it was just a tap which was more than enough to disrupt his intentions of planting that foot.
The majority of the schools if not all of them teach to sweep the rooted leg because it's the easiest to identify and the timing required to sweep the rooted leg is more forgiving. Sweeping the unrooted leg takes a little more timing because you have such a short window. You can see me fail at a sweep attempt in the
video here at the :027 mark. I tried to knock his leg out of the way right before he plants it. My timing was off and he was almost able to take me down because if it. Had I not been as low as I was he would have.