Maddenation
Doug Flutie’s drop kick
I wanted to post this immediately after it happened, but we didn’t have an internet connection at the time. As I was drifting off to sleep on New Year’s Night, I could have sworn the ESPN guys said somebody kicked a drop kick. I couldn’t believe it! I had recently been thinking about drop kicks, wondering why nobody ever did them anymore, and what the heck drop kicks were for, anyway. I had meant to look it up sometime, so the timing of this event was perfect.
The next day, I watched Sports Center to see the repeat, and sure enough, there was Doug Flutie booting the ball through the uprights for an extra point. I was ecstatic. I still didn’t have internet, so I couldn’t check it out again. I still can’t, apparently, but I did find a 1998 article about Doug Flutie practicing drop kicks, in which Flutie gives his ingenious way to win a game that you’re losing by one point with no timeouts and only enough time for one play:
Line your kicker up as a wideout. Have him run a 20-yard crossing pattern, throw him the ball and have him stop and dropkick a field goal.
Unfortunately, this was before the NFL changed the rules and now requires any drop kicks to take place behind the line of scrimmage. What a shame! So nowadays, a drop kick can be used for extra points or field goals. I was not able to determine if you could drop kick instead of punting. I say “Why not? Let ‘em do it!” But the NFL has a history of not really caring what I say.
By the way, here is a step-by-step illustration of how to do a drop kick.
In any case, this was another case of the universe giving me what I wanted. I wished for a drop kick, and Doug Flutie delivered. Too bad the Patriots lost. But with my memory, in a few years’ time, I will remember the Patriots winning on the drop kick, maybe even winning the Super Bowl!
Patrick • News • 01/12/06 • 2 comments
Comments
Dad • 01/14/06 • 10:01 AM:I’m sure drop kicks are not an option for punting. Conversely, punting is not an option for field goals or extra points. For points, I believe the ball must touch the ground first, hence the “place kick.”
We used to practice drop kicking when we were kids, and got pretty good at it. It was something fun to do that was different from pass-catch and punting. It also needed a great sense of timing to be successful, given the fact that the pointed ball could not be counted on to bounce in a predictable way. So you offset the inevitable skewing of the bounce by limiting the distance (time) you allow it to rebound. In the old days, the ball was rounded on the ends and behaved much better when dropped. Even in my day, the ball was pointed because the forward pass had changed the game so dramatically that it way overshadowed the kicking game.
I applaud Flutie’s drop kick. It’s a part of the game I’d like to see revitalized, but they’d probably have to change the shape of the ball to bring that about.
Patrick • 01/14/06 • 6:25 PM:The main reason drop kicks won’t come back, or make that the second reason (ball shape being #1), is that the NFL now requires the drop kicker to be behind the line of scrimmage. If you could just kick from anywhere on the field, then a situation like Flutie envisioned (see above) might actually happen some desperate day.
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