During a typical game, Ethan Evans of the Los Angeles Rams is a synonym for disappointment. All players are like that. No fan celebrates when their team's player runs onto the field facing fourth-and-long. His job is to relinquish possession, bring the ball back into the control of the opposing team and put them in the worst possible position on the field. Historically, players have had a suspicious reputation because of their grass-free uniforms. When a player was selected in the third round of the 2012 NFL Draft, one analyst exclaimed, “People, let me tell you something: Players are people.” That's true, but they are also vestigial organs of the game, relics from a time when football was a “soccer ball” before the invention of such modern horrors as the forward pass.
Evans has the square jaw and athletic build of a tight end: six-foot-three, two-fifties and change. But his job involves constant waiting, these days more than ever. The Rams have one of the best offenses in the league, and coach Sean McVay is no longer the conservative fourth-down playmaker he was early in his career—he's now heeding analytical models that encourage keeping the quarterback on the field on fourth down in an attempt to maintain possession. Even coaches who are not on the front foot have given up shots in short-yardage situations or when down late in games; everyone now knows that trying to get the first down in many situations will give them a better chance of winning. And therefore, more and more often, buyers sit on the shelf. According to one metric designed to reflect a player's overall contribution to his team's performance, the Colts' Rigoberto Sanchez is the best player this season, and he didn't throw a punt until the third week of the season.
Evans made two or fewer punts in five of the first eleven games, which would have been unusual just ten years ago. However, he was busy last Sunday against the Seattle Seahawks. Seattle's stifling defense shut down Rams cornerback Matthew Stafford. The team's defense kept them in the game, holding Seattle's quarterback to an even worse day that included four interceptions. But Seattle, like most modern NFL teams, didn't need much offense to score; they just needed to move into Ram's territory. Seahawks kicker Jason Myers made five field goals, including one from fifty-seven yards out that he converted. At the same time, as players are used less and less, field goal kickers, their fellow players in pure form, are being drawn to longer and longer attempts – and scoring them at a historically high rate. This is another reason why teams don't need to skate as much as they used to.
But when players do get called, their punts can matter more than ever. Evans practiced punting the same way he did in college at Wingate University, a Division II school in North Carolina: by lowering the nose of the ball and sending it as high and far as possible. This is how many NFL players have approached their art. But long shots into the center of the field gave the fast and explosive players of the opposing team space to run. Even throwing the ball into or through the end zone to force a touchback (giving the offense the ball on their own twenty-yard line) became less attractive as field goal kickers expanded their range as offenses with that field position were just a couple of first downs away from a decent chance at three points. Evans realized he could no longer “just bomb punts all day” like he used to. He needed a more varied and complex approach – hitting the ball deep towards the touchline, or deliberately wobbly kicking, or using his foot to cut the ball, changing the trajectory to give the returner less time to decide where to go.
Players began borrowing techniques from Australian football, a sport in which kicking is more visible and full of strange, deflected punts. There is the “reverse banana”, which gives the ball an inverted spin, and the “torpe”, which is performed by holding the ball at an angle across the body and kicking it so that it spirals like a torpedo. Some of the new players, including the Seahawks' Michael Dixon, whom Evans met last Sunday, are from Australia. Young players learn techniques on YouTube and attend elite camps. Special teams players, who actually have a lot of time on their hands, began experimenting with both the physics of the ball flying through the air and new ways to confuse returners and keep them off balance. In the '20s, the Ravens' special teams called themselves “R&D,” trucker Morgan Cox told me.
