drop kicks

[John Grasso]

What is the logic behind a drop kick? Why must the ball first touch the ground?
Why can't it just be punted?

[rhickok1109]

What is the logic behind a drop kick? Why must the ball first touch the ground?
Why can't it just be punted?

You could ask the same question about the placekick. Why can't kickoffs, field goals, and extra points simply be punted?

[luckyshow]

What came first, the chicken or the egg? It just was always thus. It was always this way.

Probably it was too easy to punt it through the goal.

Usually after a safety, the kicker or coach decides to punt it rather than place kick it (the free kick from the 20) Which has nothing to do with anything to do with this question.

[Evan]

If you search on YouTube for "Doug Flutie tells the story of his historic drop kick", you should find a fan's video of him explaining what happened. Beware, there is some adult language in this.

[Mark L. Ford]

The drop kick in football was just a carry over from the drop kick in rugby. I imagine that the idea was that there was a bit more skill involved in kicking a ball as it rebounded off the ground, and that scoring kicks ought to be a little more difficult than punts, or kickoffs from a tee. It's no less logical than requiring basketball players to bounce the ball on the floor if they intend to keep possession of it, or requiring an extra point or field goal to go over the crossbar instead of under it.

[rhickok1109]

I wonder ... is it actually easier to punt a ball through the goalposts from, say, 40 yards out than it is to dropkick or placekick it? I'm not so sure.

[luckyshow]

I am vague on kicking tees. I know that in college, they weren't allowed between 1873 and 1947 (later history I am excluding here) This may have been just for placekicking, but I do know that for a large chunk of football history, a holder was used for kickoffs.

And with the old football, it wouldn't have been easier to punt the ball through the goal posts. Don't think of the modern ball when thinking of these kicking questions in the past.

Most drop kicks were done at the point when the ball touched the ground. Not after it bounced up into the air.

I have seen this:
"First use of the tee is attributed to Arda Bowser, a member of the Canton Bulldogs NFL championship team of 1922."
<It should also be noted that he developed this 'new' style of kicking while at Bucknell. The kicking tee has come a long way since the 1920's. You see, Mr. Bowser made his tee out of MUD!>
""The tee idea started when I played for Bucknell. The ball was a bloated thing back then and I needed a way to get under it, so I made a tee with mud. I sent one of the freshmen to town to buy a steel washtub with handles. We put dirt in it, mixed it into mud and then had the kid run up and down the sidelines with it. I'd come over, scoop out a handful of mud and go build my tee."

As far as basketball. There was no dribbling of the ball when basketball first began. There was a lot of passing. Also other techniques, even heading the ball for passing, similar to soccer.

I have read some early histories that say that the NCAA started (around 1908 or so) because the AAU at first did not want to approve dribbling of the basketball.

In the girls 6 a-side game, two court game, in many states, a player could only dribble two times before having to pass or shoot the ball.

In pro basketball up through the 1930s, there was a second type of dribbling, which wasn't dribbling as we know it today, closer to a rusher in football than to basketball as we know it today. The court was enclosed and a player could just drag the ball across the ground (usually done at the edges of the court), and be held onto by opponents trying to dislodge the ball. The early ABL (late 1920s into the 30s, actually surviving to the early 50s) was a league that didn't use this rule. Nor did some of the innovative independent barnstorming teams. Its elimination made the sport more popular and less like pro wrestling.

[luckyshow]

More on tees. This from a 1989 article after the NCAA banned tees for anything but kickoffs:
"Rulesmakers' first ban on the kicking tee, put into effect after World War I, came in response to a wave of Yankee ingenuity and lasted 30 years. The most recent pronouncement was designed to stop a growing wave of proficiency, and more than a few coaches are predicting it won't last 30 games.

"Back before World War I, the rules said you could use dirt to elevate the ball on placekciks, but the idea was to give the holder a few seconds to build a small tee and nothing more," said Dave Nelson, dean of the college of physical education at the University of Delaware and secretary to the NCAA committee.

"Well, naturally, some smart guy came up with the reasoning that clay was dirt and started using a ceramic tile. ... Back then, elevating the ball with equipment was OK, too, and you had guys kicking the ball off a teammate's toe and other such things.

"But the abuse that probably killed (the kicking tee) the first time," Nelson continued, "were the use of helmets. Back then, they weren't mandatory and so you had a few guys wearing soft-top, floppy-eared jobs just so they could turn them inside out and make a good kicking tee."

It was 1948 before vague rumblings about putting the foot back into the game convinced NCAA officials to allow the use of a 1-inch rubberized tee. Eleven years later, they widened the goal posts to 23-feet-5 from 18-5, and seven years after that, let the tee rise an inch."

The NFL allows 3" tees on kickoffs but never allowed artificial tees for placekicking.

<The first patent for this kind of tee is dated 1889, and was issued to Scotsmen William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas. > I think this was for a golf tee...

[Mark L. Ford]

"First use of the tee is attributed to Arda Bowser, a member of the Canton Bulldogs NFL championship team of 1922."
<It should also be noted that he developed this 'new' style of kicking while at Bucknell. The kicking tee has come a long way since the 1920's. You see, Mr. Bowser made his tee out of MUD!>

Sounds like backyard football. I think back to all those neighborhood football games where we would make divots in someone's backyard so that we could have a "real" kickoff, and have to kick extra points or field goals and an alarm clock. Of course, by season's end, a backyard was ruined enough that all those pits didn't matter. I always hated playing on the street where the rules were (1) throw the ball downfield for the kickoff (2) "go by sevens" and, of course, (3) play stops automatically when someone yells "CAR!!!!!"