Free kick touchback

[Robert Goodman]

This is one of the earliest rules Fed adopted to distinguish their football rules from those of NCAA. A desire to make the ball dead early and often for safety reasons was one motiv'n. Another was that it was adopted at a time when it was rare for a kickoff in interscholastic football to reach the opposing goal line w/o the assistance of the other team, and an automatic dead ball had the advantage of removing judgment of whether new impetus had been provided to a ball whose momentum from the kick had been spent.