Illegal Kicking

[miner_35]

Team K lines up in punt formation. K1 snaps the ball over K2's head. K2 kicks the grounded ball towards his endzone at K's 15 yard line. K2 then kicks the grounded ball again from (a) his own endzone or (b) his own 2 yard. R1 catches the kicked ball at the 5 and scores the touchdown. 

I know we have illegal kicking, but want to know how to enforce these correctly.

 

[Bobref]

26 minutes ago, miner_35 said:

Team K lines up in punt formation. K1 snaps the ball over K2's head. K2 kicks the grounded ball towards his endzone at K's 15 yard line. K2 then kicks the grounded ball again from (a) his own endzone or (b) his own 2 yard. R1 catches the kicked ball at the 5 and scores the touchdown. 

I know we have illegal kicking, but want to know how to enforce these correctly.

 

Each of the instances of kicking the grounded football is a foul for illegal kicking. But both of those penalties will be declined, since R scored a TD. Neither penalty can be enforced on the try or subsequent kickoff, even though they were fouls by the opponent of the scoring team, because there was a change of possession during the down, and the fouls took place before the change of possession. So, they must be declined for the TD to stand.

I suppose there could be a game situation where Team R needs to score more than a TD and try, so they could decide to accept the penalty for the illegal kick that occurred in the end zone, get 2 pts for the safety, and then get the ball back in good field position on the ensuing free kick, in hopes of scoring a TD and try. 

Edited October 19, 2020 by Bobref

[miner_35]

On 10/19/2020 at 12:00 PM, Bobref said:

Each of the instances of kicking the grounded football is a foul for illegal kicking. But both of those penalties will be declined, since R scored a TD. Neither penalty can be enforced on the try or subsequent kickoff, even though they were fouls by the opponent of the scoring team, because there was a change of possession during the down, and the fouls took place before the change of possession. So, they must be declined for the TD to stand.

I suppose there could be a game situation where Team R needs to score more than a TD and try, so they could decide to accept the penalty for the illegal kick that occurred in the end zone, get 2 pts for the safety, and then get the ball back in good field position on the ensuing free kick, in hopes of scoring a TD and try. 

So, in essence, if K kicks the ball off the ground, it crosses the line to gain and they recover, R needs to accept the penalty to prevent K from keeping the ball?

[Bobref]

2 hours ago, miner_35 said:

So, in essence, if K kicks the ball off the ground, it crosses the line to gain and they recover, R needs to accept the penalty to prevent K from keeping the ball?

Yes. A ball loose following an illegal kick is treated the same as a fumble.

[JustRules]

11 minutes ago, Bobref said:

Yes. A ball loose following an illegal kick is treated the same as a fumble.

Technically it's treated as it was at the time of a kick. It could the continuation of a legal Kick. It could also be continuation of a backward pass (nothing substantially different in this case). It's extremely unlikely that it could also be the continuation of a legal forward pass but that would involve kicking the pass while it's in flight. It's so unlikely it's not worth discussing. The biggest critical one though is illegally kicking a ball that is still a kick. Let's say the K attempted to punt the ball, but it was blocked. It's still rolling around behind the LTG and a member of K then kicks it from the ground down field where it's recovered by another K player beyond the LTG. If you treat this as a loose ball ball following an illegal kick treated as a fumble then you would give K a first down. But it's a loose ball following an illegal kick that was a continuation of a kick is still a kick so it would be first touching by K and R is awarded a new series at the spot of touching. Then K's foul for an illegal kick could be tacked on from there.