# Pretty much the best onside kick ever **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [September 24, 2013, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578 "2013-09-24T13:49:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![bucketybuck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@bucketybuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bucketybuck)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578/41 "2013-09-25T20:43:44Z")
> [@Ravenman](#): > > But I really would like to ask you, have you ever tried to recover a bouncing football? It isn’t easy. I would bet that most bouncing footballs – like after a fumble or a muffed punt catch – are touched by multiple players before someone can really hold onto it. I have, yes, rugby isn’t my sport either but I have played it enough to know how these eggs can deceive when bouncing. And this kinda drives my point, I know that you cannot mess about trying to judge the ball and gather it, so I don’t get why the receiver didn’t push into the ball, dive and smother it with his chest. Too hard to judge says you? Well the Rice player seemed able to do it? ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578/42 "2013-09-25T20:53:33Z")
> [@bucketybuck](#): > > Too hard to judge says you? Well the Rice player seemed able to do it? This time, yes. But it doesn’t happen all the time. You’re looking at a single play, not the average of all onsides kicks. Once you dive forward and leave your feet you can’t really adjust in the air so it’s best to let the ball come to you. Every choice you have in this situation is a risk. Rice is making the same calculations but they have fewer choices. IMO, the best choice for the Houston is to meet the ball exactly at the 45 yard line moving slightly forward. But that’s not an easy thing to do, as this play showed. You can tell someone to follow the ball and pounce on it when it arrives but when it’s bouncing like that and you’ve been faked by the kicker and a Rice player is bearing down on you a very slight hesitation can cost you. It’s not like Houston used poor strategy. They had a game plan but didn’t execute it perfectly. Rice executed their plan perfectly AND they had luck. Sometimes that’s the way the ball bounces. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578/43 "2013-09-25T21:06:31Z")
Just wanted to note: go Owls! Too bad we’re 1-2 but that’ll happen if you play A&M thus year. Also as for the UH player, there is a well known concept in Houston called coog’ing it. Not surprising from a playerfrom Cooger High. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578/44 "2013-09-25T21:22:00Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > \*located in a second floor broom closet in the athletic department. Meh. Believe it out not, there was a time when Rice was a consistent top ten team. Not in a couple generations, mind, but still in living memory (if you’re a senior citizen). Our players are, of course, still smarter than yours, with the possible exception of Stanford. ---
**Author:** ![bucketybuck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@bucketybuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bucketybuck)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578/45 "2013-09-25T22:18:18Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > IMO, the best choice for the Houston is to meet the ball exactly at the 45 yard line moving slightly forward. Then educate me some more, because my thinking has included one certain point. Why meet the ball exactly at the 45 yard line. Now I know that if the receiver touches the ball at all it is deemed live, but can he touch it before it goes the full ten yards? Why not push forward onto the ball, past that 45 yard line. He touches it and it goes live, but surely if he then immediately grounds it the play stops with the ball in his possession? ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578/46 "2013-09-25T22:51:51Z")
> [@bucketybuck](#): > > Why not push forward onto the ball, past that 45 yard line. He touches it and it goes live, but surely if he then immediately grounds it the play stops with the ball in his possession? Because there is a good chance he’ll muff it and then the kicking team will have more players around the ball than the receiving team. They all know where the ball is going and they’re all headed there. The kicking team is at a disadvantage because they ave to cover the whole field. You think that grounding the ball is a sure thing - it isn’t. If it was then the onside kick would never work. You want to give the kicking team the opportunity to touch the ball too soon - they often do that because it’s hard to judge 10 yards when you’re running and following a bouncing ball. Every time they do that you win. Give them the chance to shoot themselves in the foot. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578/47 "2013-09-25T23:23:22Z")
> [@bucketybuck](#): > > Oh come on, how is this situation not the embodiment of “_You had one job to do!_”. > > Its nearly the end of the game, the losing team is now going to kick the ball forward towards the other team. There is nothing else needed than to watch where the ball goes, get it and take control of the ball. Nothing else. > > Instead the guy who should have claimed the ball was apparently flummoxed by the dastardly trick of kicking the ball right when it seemed they were going to kick it to the left. He’s an idiot. I disagree strongly, based on human psychology and physiology. Humans are creatures of pattern recognition, and it generally serves us well. If you waited for the ball to move in sports, your reaction time would be way too slow to compete. Human reaction time to visual stimulus is about 200ms. So you look at body language, you use muscle memory, you extrapolate based on past events. Watch people in any sport. They start reacting to where the ball/etc. is _going to be_ long before the it has been thrown/hit/kicked. When the pattern you’re running doesn’t match reality, your conscious mind has to take a second to assert control and catch up, and knock you out of the pattern. That’s why fakeout moves work. It’s not because the person getting faked out is an idiot, it’s because he’s human. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pretty-much-the-best-onside-kick-ever/669578.md?page=2)