NFHS Football
 

Can a punt be used as a free kick following a fair catch? 2-24-3 and 6-5-4 says it can not but I always thought it could.

I see they can't now, but ~45 yrs. ago Fed had undertaken a series of simplifications to make all the free kicks similar. After that simplification, the only difference between the various free kicks was that a kickoff had to be place or drop kick and couldn't score a goal. But starting a few years later, Fed rules on free kicks started to diverge again.

I don't know why they'd want to disallow punts for the fair catch kick. It's got to be an extremely rare case that anyone would want to do that now. Like, they get the fair catch (or have one awarded), ask for the free kick, and then, what, find out their place kicker had a sudden attack of diarrhea or twisted his ankle getting off the sideline? Or they get ready to drop kick and then see team R has left a hole in coverage they'd like to punt into for onside recovery?