While watching the Steelers game with my uncle and my cousins this weekend there was a long discussion about Randle El’s muffed punt and fair catches. My uncle claimed that the fair catch was a recent addition to the NFL rulebook while I think (based on the existence of the “fair catch kick” rule which sounds to me like an old-time football rule, like the drop-kick) that the fair catch is an older rule.
I tried wikipedia and nfl.com and this thread and still do not know when the fair catch was adopted. So, when was the fair catch adopted in the NFL?
I know from experience that the fair catch rule was in the NFL in the 60s.
The article indicates that some form of fair catch rule was in effect in 1894.
The above clearly indicates that there was a penalty if you tackled someone after a fair catch, so obviously there was some provision for one.
There have been changes to the rule (and there’s something called a “fair catch kick,” that’s been in the rule book for years, but was rarely used until recently), but it looks like to goes back over a century.
There has been a change to the way fair catches are called.
At one time, a simple raise of one arm was sufficient to signal to the official an intention to fair catch a ball. But sometime not too far in the past (within the lat 15 years, I believe), the rule in the NFL changed so that anyone calling a fair catch had to wave their arm back and forth. Might that be what your uncle was thinking of, LateComer?
Perhaps, but his claim is that when he was a kid (he’s 63) there was no such thing and that the fair catch rule is a modern symptom of the de-violencing of football.
I can’t find out when the fair catch rule was put into effect, but it’s not especially recent. According to here, Jake Scott had 6 fair catches in a game in 1970. I’m trying to find the stats for some of the players listed earlier to see if there’s a Fair Catch stat listed.
This could be just when they started keeping track of Fair Catches, but the stats on Dick James records fair catches from the year 1963 and on, with no fair catches recorded earlier.
Who_me?, I poked around that site and it seems to be consistent that only since 1963 have fair catches been kept track of. So, that’s at least the earliest I can document fair catches, anyway, at this point.
Also, RealityChuck, that was a great article. I especially liked this tidbit:
You’ve already recieved some good answers, so I feel free to hijack.
I ran back kicks for my sophomore team in high school, then would change jerseys and be the varisty kick return guy as a sophomore. Two games a night. Then the regular JV game on Saturdays.
My high school career only lasted two years because of an achilles injury, but in probably well over 35-40 games running back kicks, I never called a fair catch. Yes, I got my ass kicked an awful lot, but hell man, it’s FOOTBALL!.
A good summation of the history of the “fair catch” in football can be found at Wikipedia.
In short, old English football rules included the notion of the “fair catch”, that is, a catch cleanly taken, allowing for an unobstructed opportunity to try for a kicked goal. This quaint notion still exists in American football, though I don’t think it’s been used in a long time in the NFL.
I don’t have a lot of time right now…gotta go play pinochle. But a quick search of my newspaper database shows that the fair catch rule was very much alive and well and used in the NFL in 1955. That year the commissioner Bert Bell was going to propose that the rule be changed, as the device was so used that many times only three runbacks per game was normal. Boring.
If anyone has any specific questions, I’d be glad to go search newspapers(digitally) to get more info.
Just so–football has always had a fair catch rule! The original rationale was to allow an unobstructed kick of your own, and we see vestiges of this in the “free kick field goal” that NFL teams occasionally use after a fair catch in the waning moments of a half.
Over time the rule evolved a different purpose–to allow the kick receiver to avoid getting clobbered. It’s a classic example of Stephen Jay Gould’s premise that “historical origin need not match current utility”. But the rule has always been there.
Except in college football, in 1951. As the Wikipedia article notes, the NCAA dropped the fair catch for a year, then restored it when chaos ensued. However, when they restored it, they dropped the “free kick field goal”, so we no longer see that vestige of antiquity on the college gridiron.
Had Wiki not waved its arm back and forth, I was going to cite MAS*H for an instance of a fair catch in the early 1950s.
The mark in Rugby has evolved a lot. I saw a goal from a mark drop-kicked back in the early 70s; once upon a time they used to be place-kicked. Under the laws at the time (it governed conversion kicks after tries too) the ball was held off the ground while the kicker addressed it, and the kick couldn’t be charged until the ball was placed (as it had to be before boot met ball). There was a time when a drop-goal - goal kicked from any “random” drop-kick during play - was worth 4 points to the 3 of a goal from a mark. More often, the mark was a defensive measure. It earned no special privileges beyond the right to take a kick more or less without interruption; the non-kicking side could line up at the mark and the kick had to at least reach it (or there would be a scrum at the mark, with the ball awarded to the non-kicking side).
In the mid-70s the law was changed such that a player could call a mark only in his own half of the field, but the non-kicking side now had to retire ten yards. However, goals could no longer be kicked from marks or other “free kicks” (as distinct from “penalty kicks” - there are different grades of punishment for misdeeds).
As the law now stands a mark may only be awarded in the defending side’s 22-metre zone, but there is no longer a requirement to stand still to be awarded a mark; formerly it had to be done with both feet on the ground. There was a popular misapprehension that you had to make a visible mark with the heel of one foot. The call of “Mark!” has to coincide with the catching of the ball.
Further notes for comparison: The call is made when the ball is caught, not in advance. The catcher enjoys no protection while he is making the catch (because of the previous sentence); on the other hand, he can’t be tackled in any case before he has the ball in hand, and if he makes the catch while he is off the ground (as the law now allows) he can’t be touched before he returns to earth.
No, but Canadian Football has the No Yards penalty – all members of the kicking team must be 5 yards away from the ball when it is first touched by the recieving team*. It’s a 5 yard penalty if the ball hit the ground before the recieving team touched it, and a 15 yard penalty if the ball was caught before hitting the ground. If the kicking team touches the ball first, it’s a 5-yard penalty(but see below).
No yards doesn’t apply to the punter or anyone who was behind the punter when the ball was punted. They are eligible to recover the ball.
To continue this thread, it is also legal to punt the ball at any point in play and the punter (and anyone onside with respect to him) is eligible to recover the punt. The Grey Cup (national championship) game once ended in this way: Tie game and the team with the ball on, say, the 30 yard line, lined up for a 37 yard field goal (the posts are on the goal line). The end zone was then 25 yards deep (now 20) and a touchback scores a single point. The attempt failed, but the safety decided he could not run it out of the end zone and punted. Whoever fielded the punt, decided to try to end the game on a single and punted it back into the end zone. The safety caught the ball and punted it back. Someone caught it, but a no yards penalty was called and since the game cannot end on a penalty (although it would not have ended, but gone into overtime), the original team got a new play from scrimmage. This time they successfully kicked a field goal to win.
Just for the record, I grew up in the US and started listening to football game radio broadcasts in the late 40s and, to my knowledge, there has always been a fair catch rule. One other thing missing in the Canadian rules is that a ball cannot roll dead. If no one else fields it, the punter will, just like a free kick.