Exactly so. Getting the 10 yards on 4th down is an impressive-enough result, but scoring on the play makes it even cooler.
Dec 28, 2008 – My brother-in-law won 3 Packers tickets (end zone, just outside of Lambeau Leap range) and invited me. Near the end of the 1st half, Lions kick and Packers get a fair catch. time expires. Everyone on the field starts leaving. Then the referee type person announces that “by rule, they (the Packers) can attempt a fair catch kick”. Mason Crosby was on target, but was short.
Almost witnessed football history (guess I did see the last game of a 0 win season for the Lions)
Brian
I could be wrong but I think when I was in high school, playing football poorly, the PAT could be either kicked or run but both earned only one point. This was in the 60’s. Sometime later the run option was upgraded to two points.
Or if, as is common in unorganized play, you don’t even have a tee. Also common in unorganized play is to be playing on a field that doesn’t have goal posts, which takes field goals and extra points out of the game entirely. I think that the Peanuts gang played baseball in a (loosely) organized league, but football without any organization at all. So the kicks that Lucy kept pulling away likely were kickoffs, or generic skills practice for no specific purpose (the equivalent of playing catch with a baseball, outside of a game context).
I would say what Lucy and Charlie Brown were doing is best understood as place kicking practice. They are, to the best of my recollection, never playing in an actual game. Lucy just has the football, and asks Charlie Brown if he would like to kick it. For reasons best known to himself, CB always falls for it.
You are absolutely correct. There is rarely anyone else around, and whatever they are doing is over as soon as Charlie Brown attempts a kick.
BTW, what exactly is he “falling [literally] for”? Lucy pulls the ball away, and this causes him to fly into the air and fall on his back. I’ve played kickball, and seen people run up to the ball, and miss. They just miss. They don’t fly up in the air and fall on their backs. I’ve seen people kick at a soccer ball and miss; occasionally they trip where they are and stumble a little, but they don’t go flying in the air.
What’s special about kicking a football?
Have you ever, in real life, seen anyone actually slip on a banana peel and fall flat on their back? We are talking comic-strip physics here.
There’s nothing special about kicking a football. What’s special is that it’s a comic strip, and thus he flies into the air for comedic effect.
It’s a comic strip. Consequences are sometimes exaggerated in fiction.
The origin of that is actually comic gold. “Eating a banana” used to be a shtick. In vaudeville, during set changes, there were people who would do short routines or tell jokes. Sometimes a worker would stop, lean on his broom, and hilariously eat a banana.
When that shtick was getting old, and not so many laughs, some guy came out and performed it, then tossed the peel down. It sat there for a minute, and then another worker walks across the stage. He slips on the peel and does a pratfall. Hilarious.
I wish I had seen it.
Every year, Lucy feeds him a line about how she won’t pull the football away (different line each year).
And every year, he trusts her reassurances and rationalises that this year she won’t pull it away.
And every year she pulls it away.
He’s falling for her trickery, not the literal fall after the kick.
They’re not Charlie Brown.
OK. That makes perfect sense.
momentum. when you swing your leg for the kick you are basically in baseball terms. “swinging for the fences”. when you watch a kicker in football kick they hop/bounce around after the kick to gain their balance after kicking. step toward the ball, swing leg, connect with ball, transfer movement to ball, hop/bounce to keep balance.
charlie brown steps, swings, no connection, no transfer, loses contact with ground, falls flat.
i’ve done charlie brown falls twice in my life, no football involved, but lead leg swing caused me to fall flat. once my lead leg caught a bit of black ice and swung up and i went down. the second time a lab ran into my lead leg, swung it up and i went down.
It happens to punters. These guys are kicking for the moon and leave the ground with one leg extended in the air like a Can-Can dancer and the other one dangling. And slip of the foot on the way up or down can result in a pretty bad fall, plus sometimes getting hit by a rusher. It’s a lot harder with a place kick, your foot contacts the ball at the bottom of the swing and you’re moving forward. Even if the ball is pulled away you probably won’t flip backward like that.
Who is, after all, also capable of being knocked into the air, and having most of his clothes knocked off of his body, by a batted ball hit back at the pitcher’s mound:
Or extremely lucky. I haven’t seen the episode, but rarely is it the case that it’s 4th down and 10 yards to go. Usually over the course of the previous three plays, the offense has advanced the ball at least some, giving a down/distance of say 4th and 4, for example, meaning that over the previous 3 plays, they gained six yards, but not the full 10 to reset the downs back to first down.
So they were on their 4th down, and had some distance to go. The accepted football lore is that they’re better off punting, as the expectation is that you will NOT advance the ball far enough on your remaining down, and are better off deliberately giving it up and pushing the opposing team back via a punt rather than taking the chance and giving them the ball where it currently is.
Sheldon’s suggestion is more of an observation that statistically, teams see better overall results by trying to advance the ball on 4th down instead of punting.
When his dad chose to go for it on 4th down, whether he was considered a genius or crazy would depend on the perceived likelihood that they would actually advance the ball that far. If it was a long distance, and the offense hadn’t been particularly effective thus far in the game, then it’s going to look a little bit crazy to go for it on 4th down. However, if the offense is being effective, and the distance isn’t too great, it looks like a savvy play by Coach Cooper, especially if he scores on it.
OK. Just looked at the relevant scene. With the captions on, to make sure I got it right.
The team is “on the 12 yard line.” I Googled, and am still not sure what that means. The assistant coach is getting ready to “send in the punt team,” and when Coach Cooper (Sheldon’s Dad) says “Let’s go for it,” the assistant says “We’ve got plenty of time.” I now understand this last comment to mean that it is early in the game, and a play of desperation is not necessary.
The teams huddles, and someone says “Coach says we’re going for it.” Georgie, Sheldon’s brother, who is on the team, says “My stupid brother.” Then someone says “Power left jumble, on two, on two; ready, break!” It sounds like “One two, one two,” so I don’t know if the captions are screwed up, or I can’t understand a Texas accent well.
They fail, but then the referee says “Too many men on the field defense, replay fourth down.”
The assistant says “Now can I send in the punt team?”
By way of saying “No,” Coach Cooper comments that Sheldon got him a nice refund on his taxes.
They do something I now notice, as many times as I have watched this scene, where the guy with the ball very effectively pretends to give it to another player, who then takes off at high speed field right, and everybody chases him. The guy who really has the ball jogs the other direction, and doesn’t start running really fast right away; by the time people are chasing him, he has a big lead.
The announcer says “He’s at the 30, the 20, the 10…touchdown!”
The crowd goes wild.
So, they never actually say how far they have to go on fourth down. But it looks like the guy who makes the touchdown runs pretty far along the field.
ETA: I almost want to watch a real football game, now that I sort of know what’s going on.
First, the field has two end zones (10 yard deep rectangles the width of the field) that the team has to get into to score a touchdown, The field between the end zones is 100 yards long, and the yard lines start at 50 at mid field (the “50 yard line”) and go down in either direction to the goal line (where the end-zones and playing field intersect. The goal line is the “0” yard line in effect.
Each team is advancing the ball toward a specific end-zone and defending the other against the other team. If you’re on the side of the 50 yard line nearest the end zone you’re defending, you’re on “your” side of the field, and if you’re on the side of the 50 yard line nearest the end zone you’re trying to advance the ball into, you’re on “their” side of the field.
Since Coach Cooper’s team was on the 12 yard line, and they’re sending in the punt team, we can assume it was their OWN 12 yard line, i.e. they have 88 yards total to go to score a touchdown. This is because if it was the opponent’s 12 yard line, they’d send in the field goal team and kick a field goal, since punts are typically fairly long- 25+ yards, even in high school. Closer to 40 most of the time.
So when they say they have plenty of time, you’re right- they have enough that desperation 4th down plays aren’t considered required just yet.
Too many men on the field is a 5 yard penalty and repeat of the down. So Coach Cooper’s team just got an unexpected 5 yard advance, putting them on the 17 yard line. This still doesn’t give us a whole lot about how far they had to advance the ball for a first down- it could be that it was 4th and 5.1 yards, and they’re just a hair short of a first down after the penalty, or it could have been 4th and 40 if they had lost a bunch of yardage or been penalized a bunch.
It’s really not too material though- the salient points are that they’re backed up on their own side of the field with a long way to go, and rather than punt and put the other team around mid-field, they’re risking giving it to them with 17 to go to get a touchdown if they don’t succeed.
So after the penalty, the ball carrier runs the ball 83 yards for a touchdown, which is an extremely “big” play- most are less than 20, and some even lose yardage if the ball carrier gets tackled before they get back to where the ball was when the play started (the “line of scrimmage”).