Batting the ball penalty on the kickoff

[therealjohncarlson]

Haven’t seen people talking about this much. I don’t know if I’ve seen this penalty called before. Why not just have the ball be down where the player originally touched it? Why the need to have a penalty on that? And how do you even define what an illegal bat is and what is unintentional as part of just trying to down the ball?

 

[Hockey Guy]

Gotta admit, I'd never seen that or knew the rule before last night.

It ended up costing us 18 yards of field position.

 

[Rat]

We have seen it before. A few years back, KJ Wright batted a ball out of the back of the end zone, which wasn't called, in a controversial win over the Lions.

 

[SoulfishHawk]

this ^^

I immediately thought of that play.

 

[Torc]

Except KJ, if I remember correctly, was intending to bat the ball out. On the kickoff, the player was trying to down the ball while running at full speed. Also, it was batted out of the end zone while in the end zone. Not 1000% different, but seemed like different circumstances.

 

[QWERTY]

This was a punt attempt.

KJ situation was when Chancellor forced fumble on Megatron.

 

[bigskydoc]

Seemed to be a pretty obvious bat, and Rhattigan immeditely did the "Who me?" look as soon as he finished batting the ball. I can see complaining about it being a judgement call when it's questionable. That one didn't look questionable to me