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Originally Posted by MJT
The FK after FC is also a rule in the NFL, so NCAA is the only one that does not have it in their rules.
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Heh...depends how widely you cast the net. The fair catch & free kick is one of the oldest rules in this line of games called football, going back well into its ancestry, but many of them no longer have either the fair catch or the free kick after it in their rules.
In "early versions of modern football" (to invent a category) in the British Isles, a fair catch or attempted fair catch was the only way to legally handle a live ball, and in the various derivatives of that game (or family of games) those particular rules have taken various twists & turns.
The games that would become soccer kept the fair catch for a while before it was eventually eliminated in the 19th Century.
Rugby and some other games broadened the conditions under which the ball could be handled, but kept the fair catch a long time. Rugby League eliminated the fair catch in the 1960s. Rugby Union still has the fair catch-free kick, but limited it progressively starting over 30 years ago to where you can now do it only inside your own 22 m (25 yards) line, and you can't score a goal from it any more.
Australian Rules has rather exalted the fair catch-free kick to become possibly the highlight of the game. It's the only current game I know of that gives you full free kick privileges from a fair catch of
your own side's kick.
Canadian football eliminated the fair catch I think a few years before the NCAA abortively did in 1950.
There have been other versions of American football that dispensed with the fair catch, as played by various circuits. Arena football and Major Indoor Football League don't have it, nor did the XFL or the WFL.
The invented USAn game speedball has a kind of fair catch in the vein of the original and somewhat similarly to Gaelic and Australian Rules football, but that similarity may be coincidental rather than by design. It's not that you get a free kick, but it allows you to handle the ball, even off your own side's (or your own) foot, while you can't handle a rolling or bouncing ball. So depending what you count, you might consider speedball (and its variant speed-a-way) and NCAA's as being the only games that have a kind of fair catch but no free kick from it.
North American football's innovation in the fair catch was what Texas Aggie thinks of as the no-pummel rule: the ability and requirement to
call for the catch in advance and not get hit at the moment of touching the ball. In most other versions of football that have or had the fair catch, it's ruled only retroactively that the ball was fairly caught, although rugby required the fair catch to be signaled simultaneously with the catch.
Robert