  We discuss the notion of a large field cutoff for lattice gauge models with
compact groups. We propose and compare gauge invariant and gauge dependent (in
the Landau gauge) criteria to sort the configurations into ``large-field'' and
``small-field'' configurations. We show that the correlations between volume
average of field size indicators and the behavior of the tail of the
distribution are very different in the gauge and scalar cases. We show that the
effect of discarding the large field configurations on the plaquette average is
very different above, below and near beta=5.6 for a pure SU(3) LGT.
