Some injury updates from Herman -- -- S Caden Stern (knee) cleared to participate in summer workouts -- S Brandon Jones (high ankle sprain) is probably a week away. He's running straight ahead right now -- DL Rob Cummins (knee) is close to being cleared
As noted in the Twitter comments, kick is illegal. The kicking team can not be the first to touch the ball unless it has hit the ground.
Is that a HS rule? Texas has recovered kicks like this at least twice that I can recall, once in a regular season game against Texas Tech (2007?) and once in the BCS Title Game against Alabama.
Hmmmm. We practiced me catching the ball in the air on KO's in junior high and high school. Ball goes 10 yards (always going to be easy to calculate) and it is a free ball.
As far as I know, it is at every level. Kickers used to pound the ball into the ground off the tee and it would rebound very high and look like a pooch kick, but it had hit the ground so it was anybody's kick. That type of kick has been outlawed at every level.
From Wikipedia..." during a free kick, a ball that has crossed the receiving team's restraining line is normally a live ball, such that if the kicking team catches or recovers the ball it retains possession." Nowhere can I find a statement that the ball must touch the ground.
That was one of my favorite games. Priest Holmes just took over the game with some of the most hard-nosed running we've seen since Earl Campbell.
SWC...SWC...SWC...SWC. Anyone old enough to remember the accusations that the Texas teams never left the State of Texas to play football until Jan. 1st?
51:31 mark: 19:04 mark: Both the same play - kickoff is high, short, and near the sidelines, defenders are not sure who should go for it and/or possibly waiting to let it go out of bounds, and meanwhile a Texas guy (in each case, one of the Brown brothers) gets downfield fast enough to recover it first. I couldn't tell for sure in the first clip if it touched a Tech guy or not, but in the second clip we definitely touched it first. However, the ball did hit the ground - albeit downfield - before we gained possession in both cases. I'm surprised I've never seen this exact trick other than those two times we ran in under Mack Brown two years apart. Especially now that touchbacks come out to the 25, and the receiving team is unlikely to return it a whole lot beyond that so it's fairly low-risk.
I know this is shocking, but Wikipedia is wrong. I would suggest the different rule books. Most of the country uses National Federation rules, while Texas and Massachusets use the NCAA rules. Those rules state that the kicking team can not be the first to touch the ball unless it has hit the ground.
Free kicks: free kicks are kickoffs. Both regular kickoffs and kickoffs following safeties. The distinction with free kicks is that they may be legally possessed by the kicking team (the kicking team is the team that kicks the ball...the receiving team is the "defense") once certain prerequisites have been met. Namely, the ball has to have traveled 10 yards and been grounded (in either order) OR have been touched by the receiving team. If one of those two scenarios occurs and the kicking team recovers the ball, they may keep it and put it into play 1st and 10 Illegal Touching - What's Up With That?
