Nonentity
Third String But Playing on Special Teams
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2009
- Messages
- 737
- Reaction score
- 279
Once they snap the ball, they block and cover like any other player.
Belichick was once asked about this at a press conference, and gave a mega-answer that went back to the 70s and 80s. Steve DeOssie was the long-snapper for the Cowboys and Giants in the 80s and revolutionised the position by both snapping and blocking.
Bill Belichick Transcript: 'This week is about looking at some of the things we need to do better'
Q: I have a historical question for you and while you were in grade school during this period, I'm hoping that you have some insight based on your study of the game. What was it like for Gino Cappelletti kicking field goals back in the ‘60s?
BB: Well, yeah, I mean I was – thanking you for not dating me back quite that far. When I first came into the league in 1975, I think we talked about this before, I would say most teams had a kicker. Some teams had a punter, other teams had a guy that played a position and also punted. Then most every team had a position player who was the long snapper, either an offensive lineman or a linebacker or tight end or somebody like that. There were very, just pure long snappers like every team has now. There were, as I said, some punters, probably there were more punters than there were positon players punting, but there was an element of both. I would say the kickers had almost all transitioned at that point.
I think one of the big things with kicking, unlike punting, is timing. You have the snapper and the holder and the operation and when the kicker starts a little bit early then that fouls up the timing. If the kicker starts a little bit late then it doesn't foul up the timing, it just puts you more at risk to have the kick blocked. So, one of the things the kicker deals with is just the timing and some of that is the anticipation. So the more the kicker knows the snapper, the more he can kind of anticipate that mannerism or length of time, anticipation of when the snap is going to occur and then start into his approach to the ball and kick. Obviously, the better that operation is and the more experience those guys have together, to include the holder, then theoretically the better it will be, the smoother it will be. With a punter, again, there's less of that. I mean, there's some, but there's certainly less of that because that other guy is not involved. Again, a long answer to a short question, but part of the issue in the kicking game in those days was time.
So, if you were a kicker, you weren't able to kick until – even if that's all you did, if you were just a pure kicker – you wouldn't be able to kick until the center was available to snap. So the centers would usually come out maybe five, 10 minutes early and maybe snap for the punter and the punters would punt to the punt returners, which again, your punt returners were usually position players, too. Then let's call it after practice, then that same snapper would snap to the holder and the kicker and that was their practice, those whatever it was, five, 10 minutes at the end of practice and the same thing with the returners. Now you have situations where during the whole practice, as you've seen out there on the field, the snapper, the holder and the kicker or the snapper and the punter work together for extended periods of time. It's not just five minutes at the end of practice after everything else has been done. So the opportunity to be precise and efficient and the execution level on that, obviously, drastically improves.
I'd say then where you see the biggest change – so, was it challenging for those kickers? Sure it was. Because a, the field conditions were a lot less than what they are now where it's either great, most fields are pretty good grass or it is turf, which is very consistent. Back in those days, the fields would vary from one end to the other, depending on if you were kicking sometimes on the infield end that was sodded or not sodded, depending on what time of year it was versus the outfield end in the baseball stadiums, which is what most of them were. The conditions weren't as good, the timing wasn't as good, the opportunity to work with those players, with each other wasn't as good.
Then I would say that the biggest difference would be in the punting game when I would say until the mid-‘80s, most all teams used at least one end tight, if not both ends tight in punt formation unless they could see that the team was in an obvious return mode and there wasn't a threat to rush, then they would split out both guys. But a lot of times you'd see guys split out and then if the return team threatened, then they'd pull them and they were tight punt formations.
So in the mid-‘80s, really the whole punting game kind of got revolutionized and changed dramatically with Steve DeOssie in Dallas. When Steve went to Dallas, he was able to snap and block and Dallas went exclusively to a spread punt formation and teams like us – the Giants – because they were in our division, we always felt like…I mean, normally the snapper's responsibility on the punt formation back in those days was just snap the ball. They didn't have any blocking responsibility ever.
Then that all changed when DeOssie went to Dallas and he started doing it and so you'd see what you see now, which is two spread guys, eight guys rush, the center will block one of them and the other seven guys block the other seven and they punted the ball. Once we all saw that, that it was doable and Steve was doing it, then you started looking for, ‘OK, can we get a guy to do that?' that enabled you to split the ends out. That's not a kicking conversation, but it's all kind of related there. Then that got to the evolution of how important the snapper was and I would say that teams at that point saw the value of keeping a pure snapper that was able to not only snap the ball consistently, but also snap and block because of the advantages it gave you in the punting game.
I would say within probably five years or so, by the early ‘90s, you rarely saw a team in a tight punt formation, unless it was the end of the game or backed up or a situational type of punt. Almost everybody went to spread punt formations. That was really the result of the snapping situation, in my opinion.
