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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Punt of No Return

by: Dan Weil
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10 Ways to Guarantee Your Opponent Won’t Score on a Punt Return

When your offense has stalled and you have to punt the ball away, the last thing you want to give up is a punt-return touchdown. We spoke with three experts about how to prevent such a disaster – Rick Sang, director of American Football Specialists/ Ray Guy Kicking Academy in Bowling Green, KY; Granville Eastman, defensive coordinator and special teams coach at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN; and Alan Dykens, assistant head coach, defensive coordinator, and special teams coach at Graceland University in Lamoni, IA.
Sang, who coached the kickers at Arizona State and Eastern Kentucky and was a kicker himself at the latter school, listed 10 keys for producing the “punt of no return.” As you can imagine, given his background, Sang focuses largely on what the kicker himself must do.

• First on Sang’s list is “Precision Placement.” As he puts it: “Every time the ball is punted, whether in practice or a game, the ball needs to be directed toward a specific target.” For example, if you’re punting from the 50-yard-line, you’ll want it to hit at about the 10, so the returner has a difficult decision of whether to let the ball bounce, make a fair catch or try for a return.

In addition, he pointed out, “You can punt it out of bounds. That means zero return.” Sometimes the choice of direction for a punt turns into a chess match with the return team. “If the return team is overloaded to one side, and you’re intending to go to that side, then you can call it off and punt down the middle instead,” Sang said. Another possibility: “If you’re back around your own 35, with a strong wind at your back, you can drive a deep punt out of bounds,” he said. In that situation, you can also hang a punt up down the middle of the field.

“But you have to be careful on distance not to separate from your coverage unit. You don’t want to out-kick your coverage. If you have more distance on the punt, that means less hang time. You’re separating your coverage from the returner, plus the returner is catching the ball sooner.”

Like Sang, Dykens puts a lot of emphasis on punting to a precise location. “We work extremely hard on ball placement with our punter,” Dykens said. “We’ll use the coffin corner, send it to the right, or send it to the left – drive kick it or kick it higher. That enables us to have more success on our coverage unit.”

Eastman agrees. In his eyes, “It’s all about that return guy sitting back there. Any way he can make two guys miss, you’re in a whole lot of trouble. So the whole point is trying to eliminate him from the return as much as possible. You try to kick away from him, and if you do kick it to him, you have to find a way of making him go where he doesn’t want to.”

• Sang’s second dictum: “Maximize hang time.” That’s no great secret of course, but a punter has to make adjustments in a game. For example, “If you have a strong wind in your face, drive the punt to let the wind hang it up. Optimum hang time is four seconds or more for a high school punter and 4.5 seconds or more for a college punter,” Sang said.

• Third: “Optimize distance.” As Sang pointed out earlier, a long kick doesn’t do you any good if it’s not high enough to allow your tacklers time to get to the return man before he heads up field. “Truly great punters sacrifice distance for hang time,” Sang said. By increasing hang time and decreasing distance just a few yards, punters will maximize the chances of preventing a big return. “You want a high net yardage and a high percentage of punts not returned,” he said.

• Fourth: “Minimize the coverage area.” By doing that, you allow your coverage men to “quickly blanket the return man,” as Sang puts it. “Take advantage of the closest sideline when the ball is on or near the hash,” he said. “If the ball is positioned in the middle of the field, consider punting the ball straight downfield with maximum hang time and optimum distance.”

Austin Peay’s Eastman also stresses keeping the ball away from big returners, similar to Sang’s rules number one and four. “We’ll work with our punter the week before the game on direction,” he said. “Put it in a spot where the guy isn’t comfortable and can’t make a big return – one to three yards away from the sideline and 35-40 yards downfield. If you have a special player back there, you try to kick it away from him.”

Of course, that’s not always possible, Eastman acknowledged. “If that doesn’t work because your punter doesn’t have that kind of accuracy, you always want to practice the worst case scenario,” he said. “Say the return man gets the ball in the middle of the field where he can go in any direction. We try to emphasize converging on the ball and containing the return man. If he likes to run outside, then we want to force him up the middle, which we secure with our long snapper and protector as well as guards in the middle lane.”

The quickest route to pay dirt for a punt returner, of course, is up the middle. “If you have a fast return guy, and he catches the ball in the middle of the field, I fear him going up the middle the most,” Eastman said. “We’ll protect against the return up the middle by using gunners to force the ball to the side. If the return specialist likes to go north-south, you have to find a way to make the ball go east-west. We clog the middle. The guys with the easiest release are the ends – gunners or bullets, as we call them. We release those guys on the inside. Now we’re going to contain and spread the field with our wings and our tackles.”

• Fifth: “Challenge the return man.” This will be accomplished by achieving the goals already listed. “By combining effective placement with hang time, you have virtually eliminated any return,” Sang said.

Like Sang, Eastman views the punt game as a chess match to a certain extent. “If they see we’re forcing them to the outside, they may change their scheme to set up an outside return,” he said. “So we have to be able to change lane assignments. You might exchange the wings and the tackles – with the wings going inside the hashes and the tackles outside. It’s designed to give the return team a different look.” But there are constraints to how many variations you can employ, Eastman points out. “You can’t be too cute with those schemes because of limited practice time. We try to stay vanilla and not get too complicated.”

• Sixth: “Communicate objectives.” Coaches must make clear to their punt team what is expected of them on each and every punt, Sang said. In addition, “The punter can instill tremendous confidence in his team by being so consistent that he is predictable.”

Graceland’s Dykens argues that the punt team is the most crucial of the special teams. That’s because, “There’s the greatest chance for the largest change in field position on punts,” he said. “You need to have your best athletes on your punt team. You need your ones and twos, not your threes and fours.”

Graceland has a couple of gimmicks it sometimes uses to prevent big punt returns. “We lineup in what we call a duck – a 3-3-3 alignment on the line spread out on the outside of the hashes,” Dykens said. By pushing his players to the outside like that, the opposition has to adjust, maybe even burn a timeout. “It negates the return,” he said.

Sometimes Graceland will also send in its backup punter who is also its first- or second-string quarterback. “We run fakes out of that, which causes confusion for the opposition and sometimes turnovers. We might actually run a pass or run play, but 90 percent of the time he punts. It forces the team to bring up the returner to defend, and then we can pooch kick it over his head."

• Seventh: “Accurate and timely snaps.” At the high school and college level, the snap needs to get to the punter in about 0.8 seconds, Sang said. “This is the optimum time for both speed and accuracy.” The punter generally stands about 12-13 yards behind the snapper in high school and 14-15 yards behind him in college.

“Since the snapper becomes more proficient as he advances to the next level, he basically maintains the same snap time by offsetting the added distance with increased snap speed,” Sang said.

• Eighth: “Quick, rhythmic get-off times.” Obviously you want to get your punts off in time so that they aren’t blocked, but you don’t want to kick so quickly that you don’t have a good rhythm. A consistent rhythm helps the punter kick the ball to the optimum position and helps his teammates cover any potential return. Punters should aim to kick the ball within 2.1-2.2 seconds from the snap in high school and 2.0-2.1 seconds in college, Sang said.

“There are times when there’s pressure, and you have to get it off more quickly,” he said. “If you’re rushed, maybe it has to be 1.9 seconds. But when there’s no rush, you want to give your coverage time to get down field.”

• Ninth: “Decisive protection.” As Sang explains, “Every player involved in protecting the punter must know the overall objective of the punt and be decisive about whom they are going to block. Once the ball is snapped, the transition from protection to coverage must be quick, rhythmic and flawless.”

When Graceland is backed up toward its own goal line, punting from inside the 15-yard-line, to produce maximum protection, Dykens brings his “bullets” to the inside, about two yards outside the tackles. “That elongates the distance the opposition has to run to make a block, so our punter can get more height.”

• And finally 10th: “Quick adjusting coverage.” Practice and preparation will allow the punting team to “release quicker, and they will cover with more speed knowing exactly where the ball is headed and the purpose of the punt,” Sang said.

“This will only enhance the coverage team’s field of vision, allowing them to be alert for blocking patterns and return schemes. They will even be able to read the reaction of the return man, knowing all the options he has and being prepared for his every move.”

Sang notes that if all goes perfectly, the punt team only has to perform for seven seconds – two seconds for the ball to be snapped and kicked and five seconds of hang time. “All you have to have is for everyone to do their job for seven seconds, and the play is over,” he said. “We all can dig out seven more seconds.”






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