The Super Bowl is right around the corner. So with that in mind, today we’re going to talk about “punting.”
‘Punt’: To Give Up
“Punting” first arose as a way to describe kicking a ball dropped from the hands before it hits the ground in rugby in the mid-1800s, and in football (and that’s American football), it means essentially the same thing: “to punt” means to kick the ball down the field.
But as an idiom, “to punt” means to give up, to defer action, or to pass responsibility off to someone else.
Nobody is really sure where the word “punt” comes from. It might have been from a regional dialect in England that might have come from the word “bunt.” But like I said, nobody really knows.
A coach who chooses to punt on a fourth down is essentially saying, “The chance of us failing on this play is so big that we’re just going to give the ball to the other team.”
‘Punt’: The Boat
I can tell you that the other kind of punting you may be thinking about—the kind related to flat-bottom boats you still often see propelled by men and women with long poles on the river Thames in Cambridge, England—that word has a completely different origin. It comes from the Latin word for “flat-bottomed boat” that also gives us the word “pontoon.” Part of the Latin root is the word “pons,” which meant “bridge,” because these flat-bottomed boats were sometimes used to support a temporary bridge.
‘Punt’: Examples
“Punt” actually has a lot of obscure meanings as both a noun and a verb in glass-making, gambling, and beyond; but let’s get back to our modern “giving up” meaning.
Here are a few examples from the news:
In December, “The Washington Post” described the U.S. Congress as “punting the [government] shutdown into the new year.” In other words, they gave up on fixing it in 2018 and decided to wait until 2019.
The Post also described how the British Parliament “punted one of the most momentous decisions in British history [i.e., Brexit] to a referendum.” In other words, rather than deciding themselves whether Britain should leave the European Union, they punted responsibility for the decision to the British people.
This phrase has its origin in football, and to understand why, you need to know the role that punting plays in the game.
With that in mind, here is Grammar Girl’s first-ever lecture on football…
What It Means to ‘Punt’ in Football
In football, two teams fight for possession of the ball, trying to get it to the end zone to score points. Once a team has possession of the ball, they typically get four chances to advance 10 yards. These chances are called “downs.” If a team runs a play and advances 10 yards, they gain a fresh set of four downs. If they advance another 10 yards, they get another four downs. And so on. The goal is to keep advancing until you’re close enough to run the ball into the end zone or throw it to a receiver in the end zone.
But moving forward 10 yards—when you’re blocked by guys who weigh 300 pounds or more—isn’t easy. Teams that don’t gain those 10 yards run through their “downs” until they find themselves on their “fourth down.” Their final chance. At that point, they have three choices: punt the ball down the field to the other team, keep the ball and try one more time to gain those 10 yards, or attempt a field goal.
For most of the history of football, most teams, on most fourth downs, chose to punt if they weren’t in range for a field goal. That’s because punting allows you to push the other team back down the field, farther from the end zone.
Punting Means Giving Up
But punting is essentially … giving up. A coach who chooses to punt on a fourth down is saying, “The chance of us failing on this play is so big that we’re just going to give the ball to the other team.”
That’s where the idiomatic sense of “punting” arises. The sense of giving up, backing out, and deferring action. It represents taking the safer route rather than the riskier one.
According to etymonline.com, “punting” to mean giving up first started in the 1970s when kids used the word “punting” to describe dropping a class so they wouldn’t fail.
But guess what? The use of data analytics in sports has revealed that punting on fourth downs isn’t such a safe bet after all. NFL coaches who run the numbers often find their teams have done better when they’ve attempted to convert on fourth downs, rather than choosing to punt.
We saw this in last year’s Super Bowl, when the Philadelphia Eagles faced the New England Patriots. The Eagles’ coach twice ran a play on fourth downs instead of punting. And the Eagles won the game.
Will we see the same thing in this year’s Super Bowl? Will punting come to be seen as risky, rather than safe? And if so, will the meaning of this idiom also change over time?
We’ll find out on Sunday. And if someone asks you to make nachos for the game, don’t punt the request and bring plain chips instead. That’s just not the same.
Samantha Enslen runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com or @DragonflyEdit.
References
Breer, Albert. Analytics and the NFL: Finding Strength in Numbers. SI.com (accessed January 18, 2019).
Clark, Kevin. The NFL’s Analytics Revolution Has Arrived. The Ringer, December 19, 2018 (accessed January 18, 2019).
Kilgore, Adam. On 4th down, NFL coaches aren’t getting bolder. They’re getting smarter. The Chicago Tribune, October 9, 2018 (accessed January 18, 2019).
Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. punt (subscription required, accessed January 18, 2019).
Football image courtesy of Shutterstock.