I will take a beating...

[MD Longhorn]

To Jason's point...

I agree - this is the worst misnomer I've heard. PLAY UNTIL YOU HEAR THE WHISTLE. This may be true if you have the ball, or are unclear about whether a player was down.

But the play is not dead because of the whistle. The play is dead by RULE (a good number of rules). The whistle is used to indicate that one official or another has seen enough to know that the play is dead. However, the whistle is absolutely not the ONLY thing that makes a play dead, and to teach the kids to play until they hear the whistle is a mistake.

There will be several plays, if the crew is good, that will be dead without a whistle ever being blown, in fact.