I was watching the Colts, Titans today and Tenn. used a couple in the first quarter. What is amazing is that one of them worked! What is more later in the game the Colts were in such an “on side kick posture” that they got horrible field position on a regular kick off. So could using on side kicks as a regular part of your game plan (even when you are not behind) be a good strategy? Has anyone done game theory analysis on this issue?
Why aren’t on side punts (with the possibility of getting the ball back) legal?
The success rate for onside kicks is about twenty-five percent. The reason Tennessee tried so many of them is obvious. They had no chance to win the game unless they cut down on the number of possessions Indianapolis had. If you remember, Indianapolis did not punt once during the game, and won by twenty-seven points.
Punts are different from kick-offs in one important way: If you gain possession of a kick-off before the receiving team does, it’s your ball. If they allowed punts the same rule, you could just punt the ball straight up in the air giving the receiving team no chance to catch the ball. As it is a kick-off has to go ten yards before you touch it or it’s the receiving teams ball even if you recover it. You can always pull a fake punt and have the punter throw the ball to a wide receiver or run for the first down. Of course, since punters aren’t known for their athletic ability, the success rate of fake punts isn’t very high either.
Certainly. This article cites a success rate, in the NFL, of 24% for “anticipated” onside kicks and 61% for surprise onside kicks. The article also discusses some strategy modeling.
Your first reaction on hearing the 61% success rate is probably, “Teams should onside kick every time!” But it isn’t that simple. The success rate is so high because coaches only call it when they have reason to expect that it will succeed.
The lead men on the receiving team have two responsibilities on a kickoff–to guard against an onside kick, and to drop back into blocking position and set up for a return on a deep kick. To execute the first responsibility, they have to remain in position near the restraining line and watch carefully until the ball is kicked. If they do this properly, a surprise onside kick should not be successful.
Most kickoffs, however, are kicked deep. As soon as this happens, the lead men have to turn tail and scramble back to get into blocking position. After a while, it gets awfully tempting to turn tail a second early, before the ball is kicked deep, to gain an advantage. When the opposing coaches spot the other team doing this, they’ll call the surprise onside kick–and under those circumstances, most of the time (61%) it will work. That doesn’t mean it would work 61% of the time if you tried it every time.
Because a punt is a scrimmage play, and on a scrimmage play the offense already has the option to run or pass if they want to make a first down. It would be all but impossible for the defense to guard against a run, a pass, or an onside punt all on the same play.
I believe in the CFL the punter may recover the football for the punting team, should he have the opportunity. Of course, with the ‘no yards’ penalty in the CFL, punts are rather different from those in American ball.
I should add that there is one time when an onside punt is legal–on the free kick following a safety. Even though it’s legal, however, I’ve never seen it done. The situation arises too seldom to make it worthwhile for punters to practice onside punts. When a team wants to try to get the ball back after giving up a safety, they’ll invariably attempt an onside place-kick.
As another side note, I’ve never seen comparable statistics for college football, but I’m confident that the success rate for anticipated onside kicks in NCAA football is much lower than 24%. One reason is that NCAA rules require the kicking team to place at least four men on each side of the kicker, so you can’t flood ten men into the area where you kick the ball. The other reason is that pro kickers have years of experience and hundreds of hours of practice time and have perfected the art of grinding the ball into the ground with so much English that it bounces like a crazed hot potato and recovering it is a 50/50 crapshoot. It’s a sight to behold.
Even if you could get a 20% consistent success rate it might be worth making onside kicks a regular part of your game. I’m not sure when this would make sense, but my instinct believes that it might be when a team either has a really poor defense (relative to the offense they are playing). The reasoning would be that the offense is likely to score anyway so at least you will give them a couple of fewer opportunities per game (and a couple extra opportunities for your offense to score). Also, if you were facing a really good passing team (and your run defense was good) you would shorten the field possibly reducing the effectiveness of their attack.
You could combine this “wacko” strategy with having a really good field goal kicker (one of the top three in the league) and going for a field goal on any kick under sixty yards and then doing an onside kick on the subsequent kick off. You might even consider going so far as to have one kicker who was really good for the 50 yard plus attempts, and one who was really consistent on shorter distances.
An exception was Danny White of the Dallas Cowboys. Since he was quarterback as well as punter, he had the wherewithall and athletic ability to decide whether to kick during the play - if there was an opening, he would often run for it and make a first down. If he got bottled up, he could always try to pass. Usually teams were wise to this, but the manpower they expended on this doubtless made his punts harder to return.
To regularly use the unside kick, a team would need to increase the recover percentage significantly. The costs of failure on average is 20-30 yards of field position. Field position is often as important as possession until the score-time remaining factor becomes critical.
In NCAA, and I’m pretty sure NFHS (but I can’t speak for NFL), if a kick doesn’t cross the line of scrimmage, it’s anyone’s ball, and may be recovered and advanced by the kicking team, and possesion retained if the rules allow it (ie, they get a first down, or they decided to kick on something other than 4th down). You generally see this when a kick has been blocked, but blocking the kick is not necessary. (NCAA rule 6-3-3-1-a)
It’s a risky play, but I’d love to see someone try it.
Note that punters are often third string or emergency quarterbacks - the guy they might wind up with as quarterback, for instance, if both the starter and the backup quarterback get injured. He may have been a college quarterback who couldn’t quite make the cut as a quarterback in the NFL.
The punter has to be able to reliably take long snaps, and having him prepared to play quarterback keeps open the threat of fake punt plays. It keeps defenses honest when there’s always the chance that the punter will lob a pass to somebody instead of kicking the ball.