NFL teams should punt less
A)when behind (in terms of expected winning%. the lions are behind the steelers when the score is 0-0)
B)against awesome offenses

what if....

they get trapped for a safety! hah, now you are punting/kicking you SOB!

He said that punting nets ~30 yards in HS. That means that they kicker is really kicking it 30 + 7 yds which is close to the lower end of your spectrum. They obv have someone, or can get someone (soccer team or whatev) to do an adequate job punting the ball if they wanted to. He just flat out feels that them punting is -EV.

Kicking a football is significantly harder than kicking a soccer ball or a rugby ball. Back in high school I could consistently kick a soccer ball well over the half field line with decent hang time, probably 50-60 yards easy. I could kick a football maybe half that, with a ton more shanks. If you can buy an american football in Ireland, go track one down and try and kick it, it's not that easy, which is why even NFL caliber punters can't kick it much past 45 yards consistently with good hang time.

High school teams have sick average yards per play, so this probably works very well. IMO he definitely should be punting if he's got 4th and more than 10 and he's inside his own 10. Basically I'd punt when you have a low chance of making it and it's a gimme touchdown for the opponent. This probably wouldn't happen too often, but at least once every 5 or 6 games for an average team.

A lot of defenses find it insulting when the opposing offense goes for it on 4th and long, and this may motivate them to play @ a slightly higher level than they were before

Especially if they are clutch amirite?

This assumes that there's such a thing as good special teams coverage in high school.

Well lets make it even simpler. I cannot understand that most teams don't have a kicker that can kickoff out of the endzone with a superhigh %age. I'm not saying it's trivial but it's gotta be fairly easy to start training for that and eventually get there. Some NFL teams even have dedicated kickoff guys on their roster and they can't do it always. There's gotta be some people willing to practice that stuff for 5-6 years (not like you need to be young to kick the damn thing, punters are >40) and earn some money as a walkon lol (won't be much but probably more than you can make in many jobs).

True but if your mindset is to always go for it on 4th you'll probably be in a lot less 4th and long situations because you can run/short pass 3x a lot more often (because on 3rd and 8 you can comfortably call a run that you expect to gain about 4 yards). But yeah pretty sure we can all agree that never punting is kinda idiotic and almost never punting is a lot better.
I wish one could run some experiments because I'd like to see a pure option run attack that is never allowed to punt but also never allowed to pass the ball.

Oh and playcalling wise, I love that you can probably run some pretty nice play action on 3rd and short. Also given that it's HS you can probably catch many teams off guard even if you have a reputation for punting little. So play action on 3rd and short and also give the call for the ensuing 4th and short if it doesn't work out and snap it quickly is probably like printing first downs.

my hs team had such a sick special teams...we once lead 21-0 before running an offensive play from scrimmage. there is a huge dichotomy here between teams, maybe even greater than when playing from the los.

lol

This is interesting, thanks.

Since you are allowed to do a kick off just like after you score a TD I don't think this one counts.

WTF? You're kidding, right?

You seriously can't understand why most teams don't have a kicker who can regularly boot it 80 yards and think that you should just be able to train for it and eventually get there?

Should I be able to drive a golf ball 300+ yards if I just dedicate myself and try to eventually "get there?" (hint: the answer is no. Just thought I'd throw that in there because it occurred to me you might think this is a realistic goal).

Actually yes they can. The punter stands 15 yards or so behind the line of scrimmage when he boots it. A 40 yard punt actually traveled 55 or so yards in the air.

Also note that the coach was referring to "net" of 30 yards. My hunch is that in wide-open special teams stuff especially in high school it's not uncommon for a punt to yield a nice juicy return opportunity.

The "net" stuff also would include times they punt from the 50 or something and kill it and it ends up rolling into the end-zone for a touchback and net of 30.

Clown,

Walkons only make $ at Bama and Southern Cal

i think dudd meant 45 yards net.

like you said teams have kick off specialists, so i think you're underrating how difficult it is to get good depth on a kickoff and have good hang time. based on skimming stats from the past 6 or 7 years 20% is an excellent touchback frequency and the median looks to be in the single digits in some years. > 25% looks to be very rare and 36% was the highest rate i saw. it's not like the guys at the top have weak legs either, it's just not easy to kick a football. i would bet that the vast majority of kos, and probably kickers* too, can put a ball in the end zone if they are only concerned with depth

edit: *as in the ones who don't do kickoffs

mitch berger was so awesome at kicking off 10 years ago.

1h kicking a day+weight training, starting at age 10 should be enough. You don't even have to play HS or College ball or anything. Just practice for 15 years or so and walk on to an NFL team. It's just raw power.
I'm not a physics guy but maybe someone can do the math of how hard you have to kick the ball with what mass at an ideal angle for it to fly far enough assuming no wind.

most teams don't even carry a kickoff specialist. so you are basically training from age 10 to do a job that yes, if you happen to be one of the 10 people in the entire world who can do it, earns a 6 figure salary, but of course that can end at any time. sounds great.

96th!

wo. i definitely went to this high school. just notuced that there was an article about us in SI this month

This team lost 61-40 in the 4A state finals last night. They went for it on 4th and 16 at their own 12 in a one score game in the 3rd quarter and failed on 4th down three times inside their 30.

obviously losing in the state finals to some other great team means this strategy is fail

Well, this strategy is a failure for obvious reasons, but clearly they have a good enough team to win in spite of it