- [Ryan] We talk a lot about the 70s on this show.
- [Will] It was a good time.
- [Ryan] It seems like a good era
rife with material for this thing.
- [Will] There's a lot of people
trying to figure themselves out.
A lot of people just trying to get away with stuff also.
- Yeah, just in American culture at large.
But particularly, I think, in the NFL.
This rule we're gonna talk about today
is, like, a great encapsulation of that.
- Okay.
- It's based off of a play called the Holy Roller.
It's another one of those plays
that spawned a rule because the NFL was like,
no, you can't, okay, no, you can't also do that.
In 1978, John Madden's Oakland Raiders
are playing the Chargers in San Diego.
The Raiders are down six points.
They have the ball with 10 seconds left to go.
And in short, what happens is the quarterback
intentionally fumbles the ball,
and then in a little bit of backyard football foolery,
the Raiders just kind of kick and muff the ball
down the field as much as they can
until it ends up in endzone.
And sure enough, they recover it,
and score the game-winning touchdown at the end of the game.
- So the Raiders score a textbook touchdown.
- Yeah, it looks fine, right?
There is a lot going on in this play.
First you have the intentional fumble
by the quarterback, Ken Stabler.
Which, I think in 2019 rules is for sure a forward pass.
- But?
- But at the time--
- No replays.
- You don't have replays.
- No HD.
Can't slow that down.
If I had to go back and referee a game in the 70s
knowing that now there's multiple angles,
I would have so much anxiety back then.
To be like, I'm gonna see this once,
and I have to call it right.
- [Ryan] Yup.
Yeah, absolutely.
- [Will] Or I just wouldn't give a spit.
- Yeah, we have what is a pretty clear
illegal move that they got away with,
but then the rest of it is in question, right?
How can you fumble forward
and keep that ball moving without ending the play?
- And knowing you need to cover ground.
- You need to cover ground, right.
The running back, his name is Pete Banaszak.
- There are more fake names in this series
than any other one we do.
- Pete Banaszak has, like, Adventure Land.
Like, Pete Banaszak's Adventure Park.
Kids, no matter what you do,
do not ride the log flume at Banaszak's World of Adventure.
- He does this move where it's like, oh, oh,
and it's, like, pretty clear that the intention
was just to get the ball further down the field
and not make any sort of real recovery.
- He picks it up the way that a virgin
puts on a condom in every teen movie.
(stammering)
It's on my ear.
- Boi-yoi-yoi-yoing.
- Yeah.
And then the ball ends up rolling into the endzone
where tight end Dave Casper falls on the ball,
recovers it, they score the touchdown,
and they win the game with the extra point.
- The NFL did have to come up with a rule after this
to keep this from happening,
which, the rule still exists today.
It's known unofficially as the Ken Stabler rule.
But basically it says if the offense fumbles the ball
and it's a fourth down or you're within
the last two minutes of the half,
only the player who fumbled the ball can recover it
and advance it.
If another player recovers the ball, play is blown dead,
and then they spot the ball at the spot of the recovery.
Or at the spot of the fumble if it has moved forward.
- I love the idea of intentionally fumbling.
Like, the language in this rule
allows that as, like, yeah, you can.
- So, Ken Stabler maintained for decades
that it was just a genuine fumble,
and then in one of his most recent interviews
from, like, 10 years ago,
he was like, nah, I just pitched it.
'Cause I was going down.
He very explicitly said, oh, why not just shake the dice?
- And it wasn't even him being old and slipped up.
Him just being like, eh, no, whatever, I'll fess up.
Gotta get into Heaven somehow.
(laughing)
Holy Rolling my way up there.
I understand the stipulations
they essentially added with this rule
of, like, fourth down and the last two minutes of a half.
Because outside of those situations,
a team's not going to risk intentionally fumbling.
But I also feel like the NFL has
done themselves a disservice where
they've put all of these steps involved
that anyone could get hung up on at
a certain point that will leave the refs
scrambling for this situation that
I'm sure at this point rarely happens.
And when it does they might not necessarily know what to do.
- This has, in fact, come up.
2014 it happened to the Green Bay Packers.
Aaron Rodgers had a ball swatted out of his hand
as he was going for a pass.
It was a fumble.
It rolls into the endzone.
Eddie Lacy went to pick it up,
but because he was not Aaron Rodgers
and it was within the last two minutes,
when he touched it, they had to rule it dead,
but he was in the endzone so that became a safety.
- Because it was behind where the fumble--
- Right.
- Originally occurred--
- So that would have been the spot,
but because he's in the endzone, it's a safety.
So they got dinged.
They lost that game.
Boo hoo, right?
But it is a rule from an era when it was like,
no, boys, you can't do that.
- I think what I love about rules like this,
that are enacted at certain points in the game,
is the refs are essentially hanging on to knowledge
waiting for it to happen,
and then be like, ah, gotcha.
They're not coming up to teams to be like,
hey, just remember, if you fumble
at the point of the game where--
- I wanna point everyone to pages 14, 36 and 142.
That's why they take a timeout at the two minute warning
so they can pull out the rule book
and go, okay, right, the last two minutes.
- Yes.
That's why it's called a two minute warning.
- It's a warning so you can all go to your rule books
and say, okay, now remember, it's a two minute warning.
We fumble the ball, you have to be the one
to pick it back up if that's the case.
What else do we have to remember?
- They wheel out a whiteboard.
Alright, now, offense, remember all your stuff.
If you fumble it--
- Well, they cut away to a commercial when that happens,
so what you don't see is they all actually
run back inside and they have a giant rule book
that they're like, oh, right, right, right, right, right.
Okay, cool, cool, cool, we got it?
Good.
And then they all run back outside.
- It's a two minute cram fest.
- [Ryan] Thanks for watching Weird Rules.
Will and I are stuck in this black box.
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