During a typical game, Ethan Evans, the punter for the Los Angeles Rams, is synonymous with disappointment. All punters are. No fan cheers when their team’s punter jogs onto the field facing fourth and long. His job is to concede possession—to send the ball back into the control of the opposing team, and to put them in the worst possible field position. Punters, historically, have a bit of a suspect reputation, with their un-grass-stained uniforms. When a punter was drafted in the third round of the 2012 N.F.L. draft, an analyst famously cried, “Let me tell you something, people: punters are people, too.” True, but they are also the game’s vestigial organs, a remnant of the days when football was “foot ball,” before the invention of that modern horror, the forward pass.
Evans has the square jaw and athletic build of a tight end: six feet three, two-fifty and change. But his job involves a lot of waiting around, these days more than ever. The Rams have one of the best offenses in the league, and their coach, Sean McVeigh, is no longer the conservative fourth-down play caller that he was early in his career—nowadays, he heeds the analytical models that encourage keeping the quarterback on the field for fourth down, trying to keep possession. Even coaches not on the cutting edge have shifted away from punting in short-yardage situations, or when losing late in a close game; everyone now knows that going for the first down will, in many situations, give them better odds of winning. And so, increasingly, punters are sitting on the shelf. According to one metric, which seeks to capture a player’s over-all contribution to his team’s scoring, the best punter this season is the Colts’ Rigoberto Sanchez—and he didn’t take a single punt until the third week of the season.
Evans has taken two or fewer punts in five of the first eleven games, which would have been unusual only a decade ago. Last Sunday, though, against the Seattle Seahawks, he was busy. Seattle’s stifling defense had bottled up the Rams’ quarterback, Matthew Stafford. The team’s defense kept them in the game, harassing Seattle’s quarterback into an even worse day, which included four interceptions. But Seattle, like most N.F.L. teams these days, didn’t need much in the way of offense to score; they just needed to cross into Rams territory. The Seahawks’ kicker, Jason Myers, attempted five field goals in the game, including one of fifty-seven yards, which he converted. At the same time that punters have been getting less and less use, field-goal kickers, their clean-uniformed comrades, are being brought out for longer and longer attempts—and hitting them at a historically high rate. Yet another reason that teams don’t need to punt as much as they used to.
But when punters do get called upon, their punts can matter more than ever. Evans used to practice punting the same way he had in college, at Wingate University, a Division II school in North Carolina: by dropping the nose of the ball and driving it as high and as far as he could. This was how a lot of N.F.L. punters approached their art. But long punts up the center of the field gave the opposing team’s fast, explosive returners room to run. Even blasting the ball into or through the end zone, causing a touchback—which gives the offense the ball at their own twenty-yard line—became less appealing as field-goal kickers expanded their range, since offenses with that kind of field position were just a couple of first downs away from a decent chance at three points. Evans realized that he could no longer “just bomb punts all day” the way he once had. He needed a more varied and complicated approach—kicking the ball deep toward the sidelines, or throwing in a deliberately wobbly kick, or using his foot to slice the ball, changing the trajectory to give the returner less time to make a decision about which way to go.
Punters have started borrowing techniques from Australian-rules football, a sport in which kicking figures more prominently, and which is full of weird, swerving punts. There’s the “reverse banana,” which gives the ball an inverted swerve, and the “torp,” which is executed by holding the ball at an angle across the body and kicking so that it spirals like a torpedo. Some of the newer punters—including Michael Dickson, of the Seahawks, whom Evans was up against last Sunday—are from Australia. Young punters study techniques on YouTube and attend élite camps. Special-teams players, who really do have a lot of time on their hands, have begun experimenting both with the physics of sailing a ball through the air and with new ways to confuse returners and get them off balance. In the twenty-tens, the Ravens’ special-teams unit called themselves the “R. & D. Department,” the long snapper Morgan Cox told me.
Louisa Thomas
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