The strange and changing role of the NFL punter

During a typical game, Los Angeles Rams quarterback Ethan Evans is synonymous with disappointment. All gamblers. No fan cheers when their team’s players run down the field facing fourth-and-long. His job is to concede the ball, get the ball back into the opposing team’s control, and put them in the worst possible position. Gamblers, historically, have had a somewhat shady reputation, with their uniforms not stained with grass. When a punter was drafted in the third round of the 2012 NFL Draft, one analyst exclaimed, “Let me tell you something, people: punters are people, too.” It is true that they are also the vestiges of the game, a remnant of the days when football was “soccer”, before the invention of that modern horror, the forward pass.

Evans has the square jaw and athletic build of a tight end: six-foot-three and a changeup. But his job involves more waiting these days than ever before. The Rams have one of the best offenses in the league, and their coach, Sean McVay, is no longer the conservative play-caller from fourth down that he was at the start of his career — nowadays, he pays attention to analytical models that encourage keeping the quarterback on the field in fourth down, trying to keep the ball. Even coaches who are not at the cutting edge have shied away from punting in short-yardage situations, or when losing late in a close game; Everyone now knows that coming in first place will, in many situations, give them better odds of winning. Thus, increasingly, gamblers are sitting on the shelf. By one metric, which seeks to capture a player’s overall contribution to his team’s scoring, the best punter this season is the Colts’ Rigoberto Sanchez — and he didn’t take a single punt until Week 3 of the season.

Evans has taken two or fewer kicks in five of his first 11 games, something that wouldn’t have been unusual just a decade ago. But last Sunday, against the Seattle Seahawks, he was busy. Seattle’s suffocating defense had Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford pinned down. The team’s defense kept them in the game, harassing Seattle’s quarterback on an even worse day, which included four interceptions. But Seattle, like most NFL teams these days, didn’t need much of an offense to score goals; They just needed to get across into Rams territory. Seahawks kicker Jason Myers attempted five field goals in the game, including a fifty-seven-yarder that he converted. At the same time as gamblers are getting less and less used, their uniformed buddies are being taken out, taking longer and longer attempts — and hitting them at a historically high rate. There’s another reason why teams don’t need to play as much as they used to.

But when gamblers are called in, their bets can matter more than ever. Evans used to practice his kicking the same way he did in college, at Wingate University, a Division II school in North Carolina: by dropping the front of the ball and driving it as high as possible. This was the way a lot of NFL punters approached their art. But long kicks in the middle of the field gave space for the opposing team’s quick and explosive returners to run. Even punting the ball into or through the end zone, causing the ball to bounce — which gives the offense the ball at the 20-yard line — became less attractive as kickers expanded their scope, since attacks with this type of field position were only a few initial jolts away from a good three-point opportunity. Evans realized he could no longer “just hit balls all day” like he had before. He needed a more varied and complex approach, such as kicking the ball deep towards the sidelines, deliberately throwing a wobbly kick, or using his feet to cut the ball off, changing the trajectory to give the returning player less time to decide which direction to take.

Punters began to borrow techniques from Australian rules football, a sport in which kicking figures are more prominent, and full of bizarre and aberrant kicks. There is the “reverse banana”, which gives the ball an upside-down twist, and the “torp”, which is performed by holding the ball at an angle across the body and kicking so that it twists like a torpedo. Some of the new punters — including the Seahawks’ Michael Dixon, who Evans faced last Sunday — are from Australia. Young gamblers study techniques on YouTube and attend elite camps. Special teams players, with a lot of time on their hands, have begun to experiment with both the physics of moving the ball in the air and new ways to confuse returners and throw them off balance. In the 1920s, the Ravens’ special teams unit called itself the “R&D department,” Morgan Cox, a long snapper, told me.