Bingo! #3 made the smartest play he could.
He knows the Rice players can’t touch the ball before it travels 10 yards, or it’s a dead ball.
If he moves up, as soon as he touches the ball it becomes live.
The kick was a wobbling grounder which is extremely difficult to field.
He may have been slightly surprised by the direction of the kick, but I don’t think it was completely unexpected.
He bought second or two for his teammates to get over and help out on that side.
He made positively, the right choice. It was a reverse side kick to their weak side, it was on the ground, and it didn’t appear that it was going to travel the 10 yards.
The beautiful thing about football is execution. If you execute a play to perfection, there’s little, if anything, the defending team can do.
I’m sorry, but you are flat out wrong here.
If you think the ball is the only thing players should be concentrating on then you don’t understand how the game is played at all.
Am I wrong in saying that the guy on the receiving team should have been on his toes, and pushed forward to collect and fall on the ball immediately as it crossed that line, preventing the other team from reclaiming the ball?
If you watch the slo-mo, it’s clear that the Houston receiver was sufficiently fooled so that the ball had traveled 7 yards before he realized the kick was coming toward him. Why didn’t he realize the ball was heading toward him? Because he was fooled by a very clever kicker. The receiving team was fooled by the kicker, QED.
At the point that the ball had traveled 8 yards, the kicking team’s player was about a yard and a half behind the ball, and the receiving team’s player was about 4 yards away from the ball. About that same instant, the bouncing ball takes a veer the the right (toward the sideline), and for about one tenth of a second the receiver shifts his feet to his left and then back half a step. Half an instant later, the kicking team’s player was diving for the ball as the receiver was bending down to try to catch and smother the ball.
The root of all this, again, is that the kicker fooled the receiving team. Your essential argument, that the receiving team had one job to do and they should not have been fooled, is a disservice to the well-executed trick played by the kicking team. The argument that you’re trying to make is basically like blaming a batter for swinging and missing on a pitcher’s change up: the batter thought it was a fastball, but it wasn’t – well, credit should go to the pitcher for his skill, rather than saying the batter screwed things up.
IMO, he was back a bit far from the 45. He can’t touch the ball before it travels 10 yards but he needs to be as close to the 10 yard line as possible by the time the ball reaches there. Yes, he was fooled by the kick but moving backwards isn’t necessarily helping his effort.
The fact that the Rice player was able to gather the ball before anyone from Houston touched it or him is a signal that 1) he should have been further forward and 2) Rice executed their plan perfectly.
WHY was he fooled? If he is on his toes and ready for surprises then he doesn’t get fooled, fancy kick or not. The ball is kicked and bounces towards him, if he is sharp he gets that ball.
You seem to be saying that he wasn’t sharp because it was a great kick. My opinion is that he wasn’t sharp because he switched off and wasn’t concentrating. I haven’t yet seen one reason to change my opinion.
It’s hard to stay razor sharp and focused through the entire game. I doubt he switched off but he wasn’t prepared for a very uncommon trick play, not the onside kick but manner of the onside kick. Sure, he (and the rest of the Houston team) could have handled it better but your broad slam of him is unwarranted.
All it took was a moment’s hesitation and the perfect execution by Rice for the play to succeed. It’s a game of inches, stuff like this happens.
In discussing whether the “the other team are fucking idiots,” we should remember the wisdom in the appropriate cheer for any team playing UH in any sport:
“GIVE ME A ‘U’!”
“U!”
“GIVE ME AN ‘H’!”
“H!”
“WHAT’S THAT SPELL?”
“UHHHHH…”
I actually think pretty much everybody’s right. The UH player didn’t do such a great job, but it was still a fantastic, perfectly-executed play. Not mutually exclusive, in my book.
It is indeed, and if this happened in the 3rd quarter I would be a lot more forgiving.
But as I understand it, this was pretty much the last play of the game with the result on the line, if that doesn’t focus your attention then we are back to my original point.
I think Rice simply executed the perfect onside kick because the ball and their special teams player arrived 10 yards down the field at the exact same time. Their player had forward momentum, the Houston player (Greenberry), after taking a step forward then stepped back to prepare for it and the Rice player simply intercepted the ball in that perfect, brief 1 foot interval that was available. Was Greenberry’s step back the result of kicker Boswell’s trickery? Quite possibly. He also fooled the Houston player next to Greenberry, who initially moved to his right to cover only to have to reverse himself to follow the direction the ball surprisingly went.
9 times out of 10 Greenberry’s reaction will be sufficient to cover and maintain possession. But this one time we saw kicking special team perfection and the misdirection appears to have been an integral part of that.
I’d hardly call Greenberry “a fucking idiot” when, first, he’s confronted with a perfect kick and, secondly, we don’t know what his coached instructions were regarding a ball travelling exactly 10 yards. Does he wait at the 45? Move up, what? He’s also contending with the possibility the first Rice player to arrive will do so with the intent to take him out, thus leaving the ball for the second.
They (receiving team) can move forward and recover before it goes 10 yards. They just can’t do so until after the ball has been kicked. This protects the kicker from being hit immediately after kicking when his focus is still on the ball. If the receiving team touches the ball before it travels 10 yards then it immediately becomes a live ball if they don’t maintain possession.
Yo’re missing the fact that within the 10 yards, if he so much as grazes the ball with his toe, it’s live at the point of contact.
Secondly, he doesn’t need to get the ball first, he needs to be the first person to gain and maintain possession of the ball but not until the ball travels the 10 yards.
Why would you supply the other team with an unnecessary turnover in that zone?
The ball not travelling that 10 yards or that the Rice players would touch it before it did is a realistic expectation during that play.
While that seems easy it really isn’t. A bouncing football is unpredictable and takes all sorts of weird hops. It’s very common to miss when attempting to do what you say and if he does that before the ball has traveled 10 yards it becomes a live ball. If the Rice player mis-timed his leap it would have been a dead ball. This happens a lot on onside kicks.
Because it’s not an easy task (falling on and controlling a bouncing football) the receiving team generally gives the kicking team the uncontested opportunity to touch the ball before it travels 10 yards - rendering the play dead. If you wait until the ball reaches you, you generally have a better chance. What bit them here was that momentary hesitation and perfect execution by the kicking team.
If you look at the full speed replay, as the ball crosses the 42 yard line, the receiver takes a quarter step to his right, as if he’s expecting the ball to continue on its path more toward the middle of the field. At that exact instant, the ball moves slightly to its right, meaning the player has to readjust to his left, or toward the sideline. As he does that, he starts falling forward and to his left, to try to cover the ball as it is crossing the 45/46 yard line. And all this is happening within fractions of seconds!
If he were to charge forward at any particular instant with the ball bouncing around as it was, what do you think the odds are that he could cleanly fall on it? If you have never chased a bounding football, I guarantee that you think it’s easier than it is. And keep in mind, if he touches the ball in ANY way before it crosses the 45, it is a live ball and the kicking team can recover.
The kicker did a great job of misdirection to buy three-quarters of a second in which the ball travels 7 yards. The player’s hesitation on which way the ball is going - as the ball takes a subtle but real bounce toward the sideline - take all of another one quarter of a second. And at the exact perfect time, a player on the kicking team is able to jump on the ball at the exact moment he’s able to recover it. It wasn’t just the kicker’s misdirection that made the play, it was the incredible luck of the kicking team to have someone dive on the ball at the exact moment and cleanly field it.
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.
