YAC & RAC; Heronner; Gen. Tso

[Alice Faber]

Laurence Horn said:
>At 7:46 PM -0500 1/14/02, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>>--------------------------------------------------------
>>YAC & RAC
>>
>>    I was watching the Jets lose a football game to the Raiders last
>>Saturday.  ESPN Sportscenter said that wide receiver Jerry Rice was
>>piling up the "yak" yards.  Jerry Rice, a yak?
>>    A bit of web searching shows YAC (yards after catch), RAC (run
>>after catch), and Y at C (yards at catch) on some football web sites,
>>such as www.allmadden.com.
>
>Mebbe so, but I usually hear it explicated as yards after *contact*,
>especially for running backs, who are usually not catching passes
>first.  The idea is that they don't go down after someone tries to
>tackle them.  Maybe it really is yards after catch for receivers and
>yards after contact for running backs--if so, a nice reanalysis, sort
>of like NELS starting out as the New England Linguistic Society and
>then (after its first meeting in Montreal) turning into the North
>Eastern Linguistic Society.

Actually...I was listening to the Mike and Mike in the Morning show on ESPN
Radio this morning, and they proposed exactly this dual interpretation
(without using the term "reanalysis" of course): yards after catch for
receivers and yards after contact for running backs.