The Cincinnati Bengals made it to the precipice of the Super Bowl this year as a relatively balanced offensive team. They had 555 pass attempts and 436 rushing attempts this season, good for a 56 percent to 44 percent distribution of pass plays compared to run plays.
The last time they made the Super Bowl in 1988, that percentage was inverted — they ran the ball 563 times that year and passed it 392, a breakdown of 59 percent run plays to 41 percent pass plays.
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The tough ground game became the Bengals' identity that season thanks to an unlikely source — fullback Ickey Woods. Woods was the team's leading rusher with 203 carries for 1,066 yards and an NFL-best 15 touchdowns, while starting in just 10 games.
As a result of finding the end zone so much, as with all prolific scorers, Woods needed a signature touchdown dance. In his case, he revolutionized the TD dance landscape in creating and popularizing the Ickey Shuffle.
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It's largely a simple dance: Woods shuffled to the right and held the football to the same side, then shuffled and held the ball out to his left, before finishing with three hops to the right and spiking the ball into the ground.
It's since appeared in Geico commercials and has been revitalized this year with the Bengals' current playoff run, but Sporting News details the origin of one of the longest-lasting NFL touchdown dances.
How did the Ickey Shuffle start?
Woods had 15 touchdowns as a rookie in 1988, good for the most in the NFL that year. He was named an All-Pro and his 15 touchdowns are still the most in any single season in team history.
But more importantly than all of that was how Woods created a touchdown dance that became iconic through the decades— the Ickey Shuffle.
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It was the fourth game of the season and Cincinnati was playing Cleveland. Woods' mother was in attendance and he told her that if he scored, he'd do an end zone dance. He scored twice and did do a dance, but it wasn't well received.
"Woods, what was that?" teammate Rickey Dixon asked at the time. "Man, that thing was whack."
Woods took Dixon's advice to heart and changed the dance — most notably adding some steps into it. Two weeks later, right before kickoff against the Jets, Woods finally figured out his dance and birthed the impactful dance.
“So just before the Jets game I was thinking of what I could do and I couldn’t think of anything, so five minutes before it was time to go out, I said, ‘Rick, check this thing out,'" Woods recalled.
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He had two touchdowns that game against the Jets, giving himself two chances to show off his new moves. He went on to hit paydirt 10 more times that season and shuffled his way into the hearts of football fans and into pop culture.
How to do the Ickey Shuffle
There are more intricate dances than the Ickey Shuffle and there are dances that are more inspired by current cultural trends than the Ickey Shuffle, but Woods' dance is uniquely his and his alone.
It's also a pretty simple dance that most anyone can do, and lots have. Over the years, plenty of other players — both on the Bengals and otherwise — have done the dance at one point or another.
The scorer shuffles and holds the ball out to the right, does the same thing to the left and then spikes the ball into the ground with force.
Ickey Shuffle in popular culture
For as popular as the dance has become, it was almost banned by the NFL. There was a worry that the dance would be banned by the NFL as an excessive celebration and in violation of the league's new taunting rules.
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Ultimately, after a week of review, the NFL decided the dance was acceptable and thus the Ickey Shuffle lived on.
It also lived on off the field as well, most famously in a GEICO commercial that featured Woods himself.
The dance also made an appearance in the former hit TV show "How I Met Your Mother" and was performed by actor Neil Patrick Harris.