Today's Tidbit... Puntin' In The U.S.A.

Let's get boring now,

Everybody's learnin' how, 

Come watch a dull punt play with me.

The punt is among the most boring plays in American football, while it is among the most exciting in Canadian football. The difference is that American football is structured so the return team often does not return punts, while the Canadian game forces them to do so. The difference comes down to four rules.

Two key rule differences are that Canadian punt returners cannot fair catch the ball and are protected by a five-yard halo until they touch the ball. The halo keeps the gunners of the world at bay and gives returners some wiggle room to evade potential tacklers. American rulemakers took a long look at implementing that combination of rules for the 1910 season, with the 1909 exhibition game in the Bronx between the Hamilton Tigers and the Ottawa Rough Riders showcasing those rules. No less than Walter Camp advocated for importing the Canadian rules before and after the exhibition game, but he could not get the rules committee to make that change. 

(1906 Official Foot Ball Guide)

Although the no fair catch and halo standards Up North encourage teams to return punts, they do not penalize teams for not doing so. That is left to two other rules. One is the rouge, which, in the case of punts, awards the punting team one point if the ball stops in or exits the end zone. The rouge means return teams seldom let the punted ball roll dead in the end zone. To my knowledge, American football never seriously looked at adding the rouge, but perhaps it happened somewhere along the line.