reverse field

reverse (one's) field

1. To stop and begin moving in the opposite direction. Said especially of athletes on the field during gameplay. The quarterback tried reversing his field to evade the defensive linesmen, but he wasn't quick enough and ended up getting sacked in the end zone. As soon as we saw the family of bears, we quietly and hastily reversed field.
2. To suddenly hold or profess a position or opinion that runs contrary or opposite to one held previously. The senator seemed to reverse field the following day, stating that he would never condone police violence against any citizen. The city's legal team spent months convincing the judge to reverse her field and allow the case to proceed.
See also: field, reverse
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

reverse (one's) field

To turn and proceed in the opposite direction.
See also: field, reverse
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
See also:
  • reverse (one's) field
  • come from left field
  • come out of left field
  • Puppy Bowl
  • from left field
  • take the field
  • field a question
  • God’s acre
  • God's acre
  • fair
References in periodicals archive
On a running play to the right that looked to have no opening, he made the unwise decision to reverse field. The result was a 10-yard loss.
But the choices made by "that nation" (biblical Israel) will cause God to reverse field. The imperative of verse 11 bids Israel to choose afresh, in sync with God the potter.
Just as Obama was wrong to reverse field on the military tribunals, he was wrong to do so on the release of photographs showing American soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in ways reminiscent of the crimes of Abu Ghraib.
The respective values for the reverse field are assumed to be zero and [U.sub.F]([^.P]).
A kind of reverse field of dreams: If we don't come, they will build it.
The project is to reverse field's depletion and produce an extra 300,000 b/d of oil as well as natural gas and NGLs.
Even when they admit that Weaver himself never participated in partisan causes, they attribute this information to Weaver's "apologists." After savaging Weaver for six pages, the writers reverse field and commend him for being "no friend of industrial capitalism," and they proceed to explicate and praise this one aspect of his southern agrarianism (348).
Should the United States reverse field and close doors of opportunity only recently opened, it will do so illegally and alone.
Abbasid dirhams for the reign of al-Safah (132-36) and for most of the reign of al-Mansur (136-58) continued a general pattern established after the reforms of the Umayyad caliph ??Abd al-Malik.(4) For my purposes, the important point is that the reverse field on the earliest Abbasid dirhams had only the formula: Muhammad//Rasul//Allah.
Now the museum is called upon (as Fath Davis Ruffins writes in Museums and Communities) to reverse field, in effect, and become, as Karp says, "an agent of redemption in society," undoing the hierarchies it had previously helped to establish and enforce.
Replacing Harris in the return game was the normally reliable Kenjon Barner, who in the second quarter fielded a punt, tried to quickly reverse field and was stripped of the ball, with LSU's Tyrann Mathieu picking it up for a three-yard touchdown return.
(4a) can be attributed to the fact that the Rayleigh-Sommerfeld integrals are composite quantities which can be resolved into the forward and reverse field components [u.sub.K] and [^.u.sub.K] in Eqs.
"I don't like him making runs for losses - but I sure don't mind seeing him reverse field and running for a 70-yard touchdown."
If he misses the hands of punter Johnny Hekker, there's a likely big loss of yardage on fourth down that can reverse field position.