It’s an especially tough season for special teams
Of all the strange unpredictables through the first five weeks of the NFL season, breakdowns on special teams have to be near the top of the list.
Consider the San Diego Chargers. Already, three Mike Scifres punts have been blocked — two of them in last Sunday’s loss at Oakland. Before this season, Scifres had one blocked in 393 career attempts.
And that’s not all for the Chargers. In their loss at Kansas City in the opener, Dexter McCluster burned them for a touchdown on a team-record 94-yard punt return. Two weeks later, Seattle’s Leon Washington ran back a pair of kickoffs on them — and almost made it three — becoming just the 10th player in league history to score that way twice in a game.
Chargers special teams coach Steve Crosby has held on to his job. The same cannot be said of John Bonamego, who had the same position for the Miami Dolphins. He was fired a day after his units made a disastrous showing in a 41-14 loss to New England. The Patriots scored three touchdowns by special teams — a kickoff return, a blocked punt and a blocked field goal.
Maybe not to that degree, but big special-teams plays — and especially returned kickoffs — have played a key role all over the league. There have been nine kick returns for touchdowns, tying the record for the most at this point, and this is the first season there has been at least one in each of the first five weeks. The record for most kick-return touchdowns in a season is 25 (2007), and this season is on pace for 31.
Are there any reasons to explain why these breakdowns — not just big returns, but blocked punts and kicks — are happening? Yes, and here are five of them:
•The NFL is getting increasingly specialized: It used to be guys on the back end of a roster, say the 38th through 45th best players, made the squad because they were good special-teamers. Now, that’s not always the case.
Coaches stockpile specialized players — slot receivers, designated pass rushers, etc. — who aren’t necessarily solid special-teamers. A lot of them didn’t even play special teams in college. That can lead to breakdowns in coverage and punt protection.
“It’s getting harder for guys who are just special-teams players to find a niche,” said Kevin Demoff, executive vice president of football operations for the St. Louis Rams.
Stars don’t play special teams: With the exception of returners such as Josh Cribbs, Devin Hester, Reggie Bush and others, the special-teams units typically are composed of lesser-known players. It’s not a glamour job. On those New England Super Bowl teams, there were a lot of starters who did grunt work — Mike Vrabel, Troy Brown, Tedy Bruschi — but that was the exception.
“You’ve got to put your best players out there who give you the best chance to succeed,” said Chiefs General Manager Scott Pioli, formerly the top personnel man at New England. “It’s not like I invented that philosophy, but it’s one we believe in.”
Give those returners some credit: It isn’t all bad tackling, blown assignments and Lincoln Tunnel-sized running lanes leading to these big returns. The guys running them back aren’t too shabby, either.
“Guys like Hester and Cribbs and those guys, they’re special,” Browns President Mike Holmgren said. “The league has more of them now.”
With punt protection, there’s a difference between college and the pros: People always talk about how difficult it is to evaluate college quarterbacks who play in a spread offense and how they will transition to the NFL.
It’s the same thing with punt protectors playing in some of those exotic schemes they use at the college level, including those with three deep punt protectors lined up to create a shield in front of the punter. Those are especially popular in the Southeastern Conference, which this year produced more draft picks (49) than any other conference. And this season there were 259 rookies on 53-man rosters in Week 1, the most since 2003 (265).
Wedges? We don’t need no stinkin’ wedges! Beginning last season, with the protection of players in mind, the NFL outlawed the practice of forming wedges, meaning three or more players cannot form a shoulder-to-shoulder alignment to block for the returner. It makes sense, because those things were concussion machines for anyone crazy enough to slam his head in there.
But wedges were also useful for coverage teams to determine very quickly how the return was setting up. Now, without those cues, things are much more wide open.
“The return was always going to the wedge,” said former NFL defensive back and special-teamer Solomon Wilcots, now an NFL Network analyst. “So as a coverage guy, you just learned to run to the wedge. It took you to the ball carrier.
“By busting up the wedges, it also thinned out the coverage unit. Now, you have to stay true to your rush lanes, you can’t just converge to one area, and you can’t easily identify where the return is going to occur.”
In the end, though, we all know where the return (or blown assignment, or blocked punt, or Keystone Kops tackle attempt) is going to occur.
On SportsCenter.
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