If you're a football fan and you're alive this morning, chances are you've seen or heard about the Indianapolis Colts' horrible fake punt attempt last night. To refresh your memory:
So what exactly was that monstrosity? Well, we don't know for sure, but we think that was the Colts' attempt at the "swinging gate."
It's a play that has been used many times (especially by college teams) on extra points, and less so on punting downs. Chip Kelly famously used the swinging gate at Oregon more than a few times:
And Chip even tried it once during an extra point while coaching the Philadelphia Eagles. Although that didn't quite work out how he planned:
The idea is for the snapper to side-snap the ball to a player behind the wall, not to hike it to the dude directly behind him so the defense can murder them both. Also, most often the play seems to be run from the shotgun, not under center. Of course, we don't know exactly what the Colts were trying to do, but if we can trust head coach Chuck Pagano's word on the play (based on his comments after the game)...
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...we can assume the Colts screwed up at least two or three different aspects of the "swinging gate." Because, hell, here's a video of 8-year-olds running it correctly:
Never a good sign when you run a worse version of a play than the Jim Zorn-led Washington Redskins.
Time to burn that one, Pagano.
