NFL: How Sam Koch changed punting with ‘mis-kicks’
To understand what Koch does, you need to know what a punt should look like.
In American football, kicking and kicking are different.
A kick is a field goal and kickoff, where the ball is kicked off the ground to score a goal or start a game. A punt, meanwhile, is an act in which a team regains possession of the ball when a player kicks the ball from his hands as far as possible into the opponent’s half.
Traditionally, punters would kick a “tumbling” ball that hovered in the air, which had the advantage of going further. The downside, however, is that the flight path is predictable and easier for the receiving player to catch.
“The idea of kicking has always been — kick the ball as high as you can for your team to get there and force the kick returner to get a fair chance at the ball,” kicking coach Randy Brown said . Baltimore Ravens.
A fair catch means that the receiving player has the right to catch the ball without interference, but once the ball is caught, the ball is dead and they cannot attempt to gain any yardage.
Koch’s Ravens take on the Pittsburgh Steelers, and one of their main draws is Antonio Brown, the best punt returner in the league.
The Ravens needed to try something bold, so they decided Koch intentionally missed the kick.
Koch moves his hips in one direction to kick the ball left or right, but slices the ball and slices it the other way. He would hit “knuckleballs,” which instead of hovering cleanly in the air would swing erratically.
And, crucially, he would employ the ‘drop ball’, a technique used primarily in Australian Rules Football and, until this time, only in very specific circumstances in American Football, in this case Down, the ball will tend to be kicked, causing the ball to flip – the end.
The distance the ball travels will be reduced, but so will the time the receiver has to react and prepare for a return kick.
It worked.
In that game, Koch punted six times to Brown, forcing four receptions and two other punts that went out of bounds.
“We told Sam, ‘Get the ball on the ground as fast as you can,'” Randy Brown said. “The goal is not to hit a ball with five seconds of hang time, but to hit a ball with three and a half seconds.
“What we did was totally against the grain.”
Koch added: “They looked like misfires and the crowd was going to boo, but we knew what we were executing.”
In a game of inches, Koch’s stat line went up in yards. Net yardage is a bettor’s defining statistic. Koch’s net yardage in 2013 was 38.9, which was good enough to rank 22nd in the league. 43.2 in 2014, best in the league.
“It was very exciting,” Koch recalled. “We created something that was completely against the norm for many years.”
For Brown, it was a “eureka moment.”
“If you’re going to present something like this in front of over 20 million people on a Sunday night, you don’t want your players to be embarrassed and as a coach you don’t want to be embarrassed,” he said.
“This is not a preseason game. From a coaching standpoint, it’s confidence in the players to execute their skills on the big stage.”
