bad snap on punt

[BigCat]

Fourth and 15. High school game. Home team is back to punt. Snap is grounded and punter simply kicks ball while it on ground rolling. it goes down field 20 yards. visitors run it back 10 yards. officials throw flag saying illegal kick. visitors decline penalty and they play on from spot visiting player was tackled.

i know nothing about football rules. seemed strange. i thought maybe it would be like a field goal attempt. curious as to if there was a penalty. there was a long conversation on the field. what is the ruling etc...

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by BigCat

Fourth and 15. High school game. Home team is back to punt. Snap is grounded and punter simply kicks ball while it on ground rolling. it goes down field 20 yards. visitors run it back 10 yards. officials throw flag saying illegal kick. visitors decline penalty and they play on from spot visiting player was tackled.

i know nothing about football rules. seemed strange. i thought maybe it would be like a field goal attempt. curious as to if there was a penalty. there was a long conversation on the field. what is the ruling etc...

Kicking a rolling ball (sometimes referred to as a flying kick or fly-kick) was made illegal in American rules in 1900. Since then the ball could be kicked legally only as "a kick", i.e. one of 3 specified forms: place, drop, or punt. And yes, in some of the earliest rules of football (before its divergence into rugby, American, & Canadian rules) a goal could be scored by kicking the ball any way except as a punt; since then all of those codes have invalidated what used to be called the "goal from the field", although the term then came to be applied to the remaining ways of scoring goals during general play.

The status of the ball is not changed by its having been kicked illegally, so it was as if it'd still been loose from the snap. The snap ended when the player kicked it, so it then reverts to an ordinary backward pass. The foul in Federation rules is then said to have occurred during a loose ball play, which means the basic enforcement spot for the penalty would be the previous spot, so (assuming the snap hadn't gotten knocked a long way forward), the foul by team A occurred behind the basic spot. So had the penalty been accepted, it would have been enforced from where the ball was kicked. However, there is no loss of down in Fed for illegally kicking the ball, so team B decided they were better off with the result of the play. And yes, this does mean it may pay for team A to commit a tactical foul like that by kicking the loose ball rather than taking the chance of making it dead there on 4th down.