Breaking Down High School Football Team’s Viral Fake Punt

"Vomit."

That's the name of the special teams play the football team at Thomas Downey High School in Modesto, California, ran against Central Catholic High School during a 2013 game that went viral on Tuesday after it was posted by The Spread Offense account on social media, according to The Modesto Bee.

While the TSO user may have watched the play on repeat all morning on Tuesday, they may not have been aware that the clip they were watching of Tristan Best catching an underhand bomb from Thomas Reynolds bomb is more than a decade old — or that the play was based on some trickery Downey head coach Jeremy Plaa used when he was at Delhi High School in 1999 during the institution's first league game.

After using the play at Delhi as part of a successful scoring drive in an 8-7 win, Plaa kept "Vomit" — which got its name because the ball is thrown up during the fake punt — in his back pocket and first used it at Downey during a game against McClymonds. That time, it went for a score.

“I don’t remember what inspired the idea, but we just talked about, if we threw the ball underhand as far as we could to the defense, it would look like a bad punt,” Plaa, who has coached at Downey since 2007, told The Bee. "Whenever a bad punt comes out, everybody on the defense starts shouting ‘Get away! Get away!’ And so we send a receiver down there and have a punter that can throw the ball underhand that far. It’s a forward pass, and if we get hit while we wait for it to come down, it’s pass interference.”

"Vomit" is also a viral hit that we may see a new video of again soon as more and more playcallers turn to Twitter (X) and TikTok for inspiration. Special teams coaches who play Downey may want to pay attention, as well as load up on the Alka-Seltzer.