THE COMPLEX JOB OF PUNTING
It’s much more than just booting it as hard as possible
A precise punt to the five-yard line might draw some oohs, but a return to the house elicits many more ahs.
Indeed, from the perspective of most CFL fans, the most exciting components of a punt exchange are the outcomes a punter dreads most: a fumbled snap, a block or a big return.
So the toils of CFL punters such as Ty Long, Richie Leone, Justin Medlock, Rob Maver, Hugh O’Neill, Boris Bede, Josh Bartel, Ronnie Pfeffer and Lirim Hajrullahu are mostly undervalued.
But no more. Credit where it’s due must come to these foot soldiers, the game’s unsung heroes.
Long leads the league in gross average for B.C., with an impressive 50.9 yards per punt, and has the season’s longest boot at 75 yards. Calgary’s Maver has dropped a league-leading six punts inside the opponent’s 10-yard line and Edmonton’s opponents have returned O’Neill’s punts for a league-low 179 yards.
Ottawa’s Leone has the edge over everyone in net average, at 41 yards. And among some members of this small fraternity, Maver and Winnipeg ’s Medlock in particular, that’s a more interesting and telling statistic.
“You look at the way some people play the game and they’re just playing for gross average and that doesn’t really matter anymore,” Maver said in a preseason interview. “We really don’t care about our gross average anymore, we just care about the net average. Adding different wrinkles to the game is going to help your net average because it makes the distance of the kicks and the hang time more effective.”
Punting wrinkles? Yes, it’s a thing. Banana kicks. Boomerangs. Australian rules-type drop kicks. Turns out punters do more than kick the ball as hard and as far as they can every time out. Medlock and Maver, who often communicate about their craft, are credited with embracing the technical advancements L.A.’s Johnny Hekker and Baltimore’s Sam Koch brought to the NFL.
Koch pioneered the misdirection kick — hips pointed one direction, leg swings the other — while Hekker is the reigning king of net punting, with an all-time NFL high of 46 yards set in 2016.
“There’s a lot,” said Maver, when asked how many different kicks are in his arsenal. “If you want to go cross-field, to the boundary, you want to hang it up with a straight Aussie, if you want to go misdirection with the Aussie, misdirection on the hash with the Aussie. There’s a lot of different things you can do.
“The field we play on is massive, the weather we play in is worse than any other football league, so it’s just a matter of adapting to the weather so you hit kicks that your guys will be able to cover and not help out the return team.”
The idea is to make the return man truly uncomfortable.
“If they know they can just camp out on the hash, catch a ball and have 20 yards to work before they have opposite colour in their face, then it’s going to turn into a track meet and that’s not what the game is about,” Maver said.
“Especially being an older guy now in the league, somebody who is in preservation mode rather than potential mode, I’m trying to bring different things to the game.”
Maver said Medlock encourages him to push the envelope. And Medlock was working on adding to his own quiver during the pre-season.
“I’ve studied a lot of film, guys in the NFL. It’s different than just hitting a ball away to a returner. Last year I added a boomerang and was able to hit those a couple times inside the 20. This year I’ll showcase something else.”
Long said during the preseason that he, too, had been experimenting.
“I’ve got some stuff. It’s tough to use it in certain situations. I don’t like using it in Calgary, some of those places where there is a lot of wind traditionally. Last year I didn’t have too many opportunities to use it. We had a lot of open field punts.
“But yeah, there are certain things I have that people haven’t seen yet. Even if they knew, they wouldn’t notice it until it’s in the air.”