How the pandemic messed with #CollegeKickers
You might think specialists are well suited to train amid a truncated practice schedule. A coordinator explains why that's not necessarily the case.
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Maybe we take it a little easy on our kickers this season when they miss?
I’ve tried to think about all the myriad effects the weirdest offseason this sport has had in decades could have on a team. The little things. That led me to specialists.
#CollegeKickers are not generally that bad . As Peter Baugh details at The Athletic, FBS’ field goal make percentage has trended upward over the last two decades.
Kickers hit 74.86 percent of their field goals in 2019, an FBS record and up from 67.42 percent in the 2000 season. Kickers set a record with 95 made field goals of 50 yards or longer. Overall attempts are up, too — the 2,574 tries last season fell just short of 2,586, the all-time mark from 2015.
It’s not the NFL’s annual low-to-mid-80s make rate, but it’s improvement.
However, I will give you this: College kickers certainly were that bad on the first relatively “full” weekend of 2020 games.
On Week 4 Saturday, FBS kickers went 32-of-53 on field goals, a 60.1% make rate. It was the worst day of field goal kicking since 2007, according to The Athletic.
There have been some notable missed kicks and other haphazard special teams as the sport has found its sea legs. Texas State has so far led the way by almost capping off a comeback with a 91-yard kick return to the house against UTSA … except the Bobcats missed the extra point and ended up losing in overtime.
Georgia Tech had two field goals and an extra point blocked in the opener against Florida State, then had another kick blocked against UCF the next week. This is just a taste of a team that didn’t look like they’d taken live field goal reps with an actual rush since their season ended last November.
Maybe Georgia Tech didn’t look like they’d repped live field goals against FSU because they hadn’t really repped live field goals?
I called a special teams coach, Eastern Kentucky’s Derek Day, to ask him about how this offseason has been uniquely challenging for specialists.
Teams are all over the place with depth charts wrecked by players sitting out and truncated practices and the general uncertainty of the situation. As Day put it, “I think a lot of people are trying to survive right now.”
That may mean platooning special teams units in different ways, or altering the way you practice those units. But he brought up something deeper, too.
“Nobody ever talks about the chemistry between a holder and a kicker or a snapper and a holder. There’s gotta be chemistry between those things too,” Day said. “You miss a back-shoulder throw on a third down, and you run off to the sideline and the announcer might say, ‘They’re a little off there, they were still working on the timing.’ You miss a field goal, it's ‘what are we doing?’ it’s not ‘a little off there, they’ll get it.’ It’s three points or one point or not.”
A field goal or PAT is a higher-leverage play than many of the 45 or 50 passes a QB might throw in a game. An incompletion in the second quarter around midfield just doesn’t have the outsized importance of actually adding or subtracting points from the scoreboard.
I didn’t take this into account as something that really matters, because how often do you think of the intricacies of the snap, the hold, and the kick? Those do get repped over and over and over again by specialists, who do spend a ton of time together.
If you ever go to a football practice, you’ll see the punters, kickers, and long snappers on a field by themselves most of the day. Just like any other position group, these guys spend a lot of time together. It’s one of the reasons plenty of teams have specialist IGs and Twitters and TikTok accounts. They’re exclusive clubs:
Well, guess what specialists haven’t been doing? Barely anyone had a sniff of spring practice. Summer workouts were at best truncated. Are kickers getting as much time as they could to just go strike balls with the boys?
The existence of college football’s greatest natural resource – the Australian punter – created a unique problem this summer too.
“Our punter is our holder,” Day said of the Colonels’ Phillip Richards. “He was on another continent. We’re doing Zoom meetings at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and it’s four o’ clock in the morning there. He’s got to set an alarm, and of course he wakes up and his hair’s all over the place and he’s in bed.”
All of that makes what Eastern Kentucky attempted back in Week 0 all the more jarring in hindsight
This made me sit up on my couch:
You, the normal observer:
The score?
Me, enlightened:
No, my friend. THE DISTANCE.
In 2019, only 13 of 124 FCS teams attempted a field goal of 50-plus yards. Only two attempted more than one. So when EKU’s Alexander Woznick took his steps and lined it up from 54 yards, it caught my attention. The moment proved anticlimactic as he missed wide right, but Woznick absolutely had the leg. His kick bounced well beyond the uprights.
The 54-yard attempt didn’t stand out to me because of his skill above a replacement-level FCS kicker. It was just so aggressive, especially for Game 1 after this weird offseason.
Day was clear that based on a pregame conversation with his fellow co-ST coordinator, Kevin McKeethan, that they felt comfortable from 55 yards with the wind and 50 yards without it. And to their credit, he certainly had the leg.
Woznick was good enough to be on an SEC team. He kicked field goals in a couple games for South Carolina in 2017 before being overtaken on the depth chart at place kicker and handling kickoffs in 2018. He transferred to Eastern last year.
And as the season rolls on, we’re seeing coaches unafraid to dial up the long ones. Louisiana nailed a 53-yarder to win beat Georgia Southern last weekend.
Despite the pandemic, kickers are doing their jobs with relatively little long-term drop off – so far.
One bad week is a small sample size, and through Week 4, the field goal kicking is right in line with where it’s supposed to be – even after last weekend’s disaster:
Total: 145 of 196 (74%)
Power 5 teams: 79 of 105 (75.2%)
Group of 5 teams: 66 of 91 (72.5%)
If this year’s kicking dips below the level of last season’s 20-year high, the pandemic would be a fair excuse. That seems unlikely as more teams get more reps kicking (particularly in game). Having your holder on this side of the Atlantic probably helps too.
In the Before Times. (Creative Commons.)