Players in college have 5 years in which to play 4 years of ball at the college level. Often players who are just out of highschool are not big enough or skilled enough to contribute right away so they can be “redshirted” their first year in college to allow them time to develop. This also helps a lot of them academically since they can get acclimated to a new environment and concentrate on their studies.
So when a guy sits out his first year as a “redshirt” he will be a sophomore academically when he actually plays his first game but he has his whole four years of athletic eligibility left. To denote that these players aren’t fresh out of highschool they will be referred to as redshirt freshmen as opposed to true freshmen.
Knowing whether a player has his redshirt year left or not is very important. If one of your better players gets injured later in his career it is often possible for him to take a redshirt year to give himself time to recover. If he has already taken a redshirt year then this option may not be available to him. It gets more complicated than this but I think I have covered what the phrase means and why it is used.
It could be considered spearing. It’s also really poor tackling form and it’s much more likely to hurt the guy making the hit than the guy receiving it.
One of the big things you hear high school coaches say is “Don’t lower your head!”
Mark Kelso of the Buffalo Bills wore a helmet with exterior padding during the early '90’s (when the Bills were in all those Super Bowls).
I did a quick Google search and found this page which appears to be some kind of Q&A forum about helmets. One question is interesting (scroll down a bit):
It is apparently taken as a given by some (based on the question) that exterior padding is risky; I believe for the reasons somebody upthread mentioned - soft padding can “grab” and twist the head in grazing impacts where a hard shell would simply slide by.
Unless there is a misunderstanding, I believe that this is incorrect. If the hit occured after the ball was dead (which seems to be the case), then Grumbling State would not get the ball back.
They would get the ball back (as racer72 indicated above) if a Weevil player committed a foul during the play, but not after.
Also, in the case of unneccesary roughness penalties that have little to no actual bearing on the game, the player is often ejected. This happened in an NFL game this year when a player on a team i forget punched another player while they were all tangled up trying to block a field goal at the end of a half.
I saw almost this exact situation this season. I beleive it was an Eagles game. The other team punted to the Eagles and then managed to down the ball on the 1. After the other team downed it, one of the Eagles players took a cheap shot at his blocker and knocked him down and out of bounds.
After they annonunced the personal foul followed by a 1/2 yard penalty (they didn’t eject him) I wondered why this kind of thing didn’t happen more often cuz hey, free shot.
That was Patriots rookie guard Logan Mankins, who punched Denver’s Ebenezer Ekuban right in the (becupped) jewels, right in front of an official. Getting ejected had to hurt much less than hearing about it from his coaches and teammates afterward, of course.
vetbridge, the rare cases of athletes getting arrested have AFAIK all involved actions that could not even charitably be considered part of the game. Hitting someone unnecessarily would normally be assault but never attracts police attention. Obvious and inarguable intent to injure severely, as when Todd Bertuzzi broke that guy Moore’s neck with a stick swing in an NHL game, seems to be the standard.
Brad Kelso’s helmet was called the “Gazoo Helmet”, after the Flintstones character.
Once in a while, the NCAA will grant a petition for a 6th year, if the player gets injured twice. They also are susceptible to sob stories from guys who get hurt in the first game of the season and want to get redshirt credit for it.