Flag football needs to get rid of the flag

Flag football needs to get rid of the flag

Before there was flag football, there was touch football. JFK made it famous. But it started before him.
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https://www.footballarchaeology.com/p/how-touch-and-flag-football-were-born
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I was a West Point cadet from 7/1/64 to 6/5/68 when I graduated. General Douglas MacArthur was superintendent of West Point, his alma mater ’03, after WW I. One of the changes he implemented was that all cadets had to play a sport during each of the three non-summer seasons.
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That evolved into a two-tier system where intercollegiate recruited West Point athletes played their sport in season and, now, do off-season training for their intercollegiate sport the rest of the academic year. The rest of the cadets, of which I was one, had to play intramural sports in each of the three non-summer seasons. Since the number of cadets when I was there grew from 2,500 cadets to the current 4,400, the number of such sports is enormous.
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Each of the 36 cadet companies (about 125 cadets in each) has a team in each intramural sport. The variety of sports is huge including skiing, orienteering, boxing, almost every sport other than baseball or softball (the latter require huge fields and the mountainous campus simply has no place to build so many such fields).
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As they finally got up to 4,400 cadets in 1967-8, they added a new sport: touch football. In the Spring of 1968, my senior year, I was assigned to be a referee of touch football. Seniors at West Point generally are the coaches, officials, and team captains of intramural sports as part of training them to be leaders. I was an intramural soccer captain in the fall of my senior year. I was on the ski team, which was coached by my roommate in the winter season.
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Annapolis, which had a similar “all midshipmen had to be athletes” policy, already had touch football. So Army contacted them to see how to do it.
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One surprise was touch football had the highest injury rate of all intramural sports at Annapolis. Clearly, the reason for that was the all-male-then players had played tackle football in high school and before.
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I believe that the current girls flag football sport would not have that problem if it eliminated the flags and went to touch because only a rare girl (including my granddaughter who played youth tackle and is now a varsity high school flag quarterback) has ever played tackle football.
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Why did flag replace touch? Apparently, it was seen as better proof that the “tackle” had been made. True, but here are the problems with flag:
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A. Flags are maddeningly hard to pull. My son has been coaching a girls high school flag team the last two years. His team lost in the North Coast Section (52 girls flag teams) final playoff game in OT last season.
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I generally attend the games. Time and again, the ball carrier runs through a crowd of would-be “tacklers” who grab at the flag but come up empty-handed. What other “sport” features such devoid-of-athletic-ability futility.
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If NFHS insists on some sort of pulling a uniform to prove a “tackle,” I suggest wildly fluttering 2-inch-wide strips of shiny cloth be replaced by vertical D-rings made of cloth on each side.
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B. I recall no disputes about whether the ball carrier was touched at West Point in Spring 1968. I must note that West Point had a strict honor code then. If a ball carrier said he was not touched and the defender said he did touch, one would be expelled for violating the honor code. There were no such disputes that I recall.
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C. I recommend one-hand touch, not two-hand touch. I saw back in the day when the touch version was more popular that the two-handed version generated far more disputes as to whether both hands touched than the one-hand touch rule did.
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D. The current 2025 NFHS rule book actually already IS partly a one-hand-touch game. Here is Rule 4 Section 2 Article 2 c.
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“If the flag belt of the player in possession of the ball inadvertently falls to the ground falls to the ground and an opponent delivers a one-hand touch between the shoulders and knees (including arms and hands).”
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I recommend that the flags be eliminated and that a “tackle” be defined as one-hand touching any part of the ball carrier’s body.
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E. Here is the main problem. The maddening difficulty of pulling a flag is causing defenders to stop the ball carrier by blocking forward movement, to grab the ball carrier’s body or uniform, then grope around trying to get hold of a flag. This causes injuries and flag referees have driven coaches and players nuts by either not throwing a penalty flag at all after such holding or by blaming the ball carrier for her being stopped cold from running.
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F. Switching to touch would also provide the benefit of eliminating the penalty for flag guarding (trying to swat your opponent’s hand away from your flag). Flag guarding greatly resembles swinging your arms normally as we all do when we run.
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G. I have watched on line several videos that tell flag players how to avoid having their flag pulled. One technique is to spin thereby pressing the flags against the ball carrier’s waist. Google AI Overview says, “The NFL is ranked as the most popular sport in the United States and holds the highest average attendance of any sporting league globally, with its popularity driven by a massive fan base, high viewership, and global brand recognition.” So it makes sense to replicate tackle football as much as possible when devising the rules for flag football. Spinning is a technique used by tackle football carriers. But it entails ramming his shoulder pad into a defender then spinning off that contact. Ramming is strictly forbidden and appropriately so in flag football.
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H. Eliminating flags eliminates the cost of the sport the fuss to make sure the flags and belts are properly worn before and during the game. Touch football requires just one piece of equipment: a football.
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I. Another NFHS rule of flag now is Rule 1Section 5 article 1a says, “A jersey…shall be tucked into the uniform bottom.”
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In actual practice, many of my son’s opposing players tuck in the bottom of their jersey into their shorts, but blouse the near bottom of the jersey so that is hangs down over the flag belt thereby hiding part of the flag under the bloused portion of the jersey and pressing that portion of the flag against the ball carrier’s hips. When told to eliminate the blousing, they do so grudgingly and only partially and the officials grow weary of the cycle of nagging the cheating players again and again during the game. Eliminating the flag and flag belt eliminates this widely used method of cheating. In touch football, such blousing would make it easier to touch the ball carrier.
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Another technique advocated in flag videos is to lower your hips as you pass a would-be tackler. Although that is legal and might indeed cause a would-be flag puller to miss high, it is an awkward, difficult, non-athletic movement found in no other athletic competition. Flag players should benefit from speed and ability to change direction and start and stop as they elude “tacklers” as tackle football players do. They should not be engaging in movements that tackle football players never use, movements that serve only to make a 2-inch wide strip of shiny cloth move in odd ways that human athletes find difficult to replicate.
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Shame on the NFHS rule writers and the current officials for allowing and encouraging all these unpadded collisions because of their ill-advised compulsion to prove a “tackle” has occurred by forcing defenders to get hold of the wildly fluttering 2-inch-wide strip of shiny cloth and pull it hard enough to break it loose from the belt.
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Such a one-hand-touch rule would eliminate the need to stop, hold, and grope for the flag and the resulting injuries and the unfair penalizing of the offense for the “crime” of running toward the opponent end zone.
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Do you doubt me? We have hundreds of videos showing the stopping and holding the ball carrier and grabbing her shirt and shorts in order to finally grab the flag. In touch, no one grabs the jersey or shorts of the ball carrier.
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My son’s team this season played more than a dozen opponents so far in jamborees, league games, and exhibition games. His players said the flags of one high school this year were very hard to pull. I suspect they were illegally modified.
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If flags are continued, there should be a pre-game inspection with a fish scale and a specified pull weight that releases the flag. With my suggestion of D rings instead of flags, any failure of the ring to release would be embarrassingly obvious as the defenders swung the ball carrier around like a track-and-field hammer throw. One-hand touch is simpler.
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The incremental proof provided by the pulled flag evidence is far from worth all the injuries and dangerous, unfair holds now used to grab a flag.
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I suggest that you adopt a separate set of touch rules and let one league or state abide by those rules—no flags—for a season to see whether touch produces a superior and safer game experience for all involved.

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