I’m aware of course that the kicks are somewhat different, but ISTM that the skillset is close enough that someone who is good at one would be good at the other, if they practiced for it. And it’s not like these guys are in on enough plays or running around enough that they would get spent from doing both.
So the question is why are there not a lot of people who fill both roles?
My guess is that a lot of them do both at lower levels, but once you get to college (if you’re really good), you’ll end up specializing at one or the other because if you want to become a professional athlete, you’re probably better off being great at one thing instead of being really good at a couple of things. And NFL teams feel it’s worth the roster space to have both a punter and a placekicker because they want the best punters and placekickers they can get. Evidently they feel there would be a tradeoff that is not worth the roster spot and the money they would save from having one guy do both jobs. Wikipedia says the techniques are different and that leg fatigue and injuries are also important concerns.
Small consolation but often times the punter will catch the deep snap and hold for the placekicker on extra points and field goals, this because he already is quite adept at fielding those snaps from his punting duties. It’s not always the case, other ‘hands’ men like receivers and even QBs can do it, but often it will be the punter.
The punter is usually the placeholder because he gets the most practice at it. A team will normally have specialists for placekicking, punting, and long snapping, and those three get to spend a lot of quality time together alone on the far field during practice. The punter holds when the placekicker is practicing because he’s available to do it, while the offensive and defensive players are practicing offense and defense. If they get bored, they might switch positions and be prepared to back each other up.
Another possible factor is that there’s more of a premium than ever before on accuracy in placekicking - a guy who can’t hit 99% of his extra points, or 50% of his field goal attempts from 45 yards, can’t hold a job in the NFL. Compromising that and making him punt too, just to save an active roster spot for a third-string guard or somebody like that who isn’t going to play anyway, is not a wise use of limited resources.
That said, it’s been done (Don Cockroft for the Browns in the 1970’s comes to mind) but not recently.
Didn’t the Saints draft a kicker in the first round in the 80’s that did both?
I can’t think of his name. I was to say Exeter or something, but I know that’s not correct.
I’ll see if I can find him.
He was a high pick too, I want to say first round, but again, I can’t remember.
I’ll be back if I can locate the guy.
His name was Russell Erxleben, and the Saints did draft him in the first round in 1979. They drafted him to fill the two roster spots of punter and place kicker, but he did mostly punting, according to his wikipedia article.
He also spent some time in jail for securities fraud after his playing career was over.
He was a stud in college, a three time all-american kicker.
The Saints took him 11th over-all!
There have definitely been guys in the NFL that have done place kicking and punting. It’s become very rare. I can’t think of any names off-hand, however, and I’d bet it’s been a good 20 years since it was even fairly common. It’s almost always an issue of specialization, as field goal kicking in particular has gotten increasingly more accurate over that time frame. I also recall teams where the punter did the kickoffs, as he had a more powerful leg than the regular place kicker, though that was always a pretty rare occurance.
If I’m reading this correctly, Erxleben was made four kicks and missed four kicks in his career. He also threw one touchdown pass, had one interception returned for a touchdown, and kicked seven extra points. Truly he was a renaissance man.
I agree with what is stated above. However, I was also thinking these two positions are very specialized, and a team would be hard-pressed to get someone else on the roster to do either of these with any competence. With that in mind, these two position should be able to back each other up decently if one or the other got injured during the game. If one player did both, and got injured, the team would be in a lot of trouble for that game.
I remember Erxleben well as we followed the SWC then. A game I watched this week had another Erxleben, I believe it was NCAA and must be his son.
ETA: Yep, Texas Tech.
As has been already noted, kicking and punting are similar, but not so very similar that one will necessarily excel at both at the NFL level. (That said, for most NFL teams, their backup kicker is their punter, and vice-versa.)
The holder for placekicking is now nearly always the punter, but that hasn’t always been the case. Not too long ago (10-15 years), the holder was usually the team’s backup QB.
Erxleben was, as noted above, outstanding in his college career at both kicking and punting, which is why he was drafted so highly. However, the SWC, in those days, was sort of known for some ridiculous kicking performances, as the conference allowed the players to essentially supply their own balls for kicking plays – which meant that they used very well-broken-in balls (which are far easier to kick).
Erxleben (and his kicking/punting contemporary, Steve Little, who played at Arkansas, and was also drafted in the first round, by the Cardinals) struggled mightily with simultaneously handling both kicking and punting in the NFL. In Erxleben’s case, he really couldn’t get the hang of placekicking in the NFL. It’s difficult to say what the issue was – it might have been the harder ball, it might have been no longer being able to kick from a tee (the NCAA allowed tees to be used for FGs and XPs in that era), it might have been the pressure of being a first-round pick.
At any rate, he was injured in his first NFL game (in which he threw that interception), and missed the rest of his rookie season. When he came back for his second season, his kicking accuracy was horrible, and his punting wasn’t too hot, either. The Saints brought in another kicker after 2 games, with the hope that, when he was able to focus solely on one task (punting), Erxleben would snap out of his funk. He hung on as a punter for a while, but never lived up to his promise.
Little’s story was even sadder – the Cardinals cut him after 2+ seasons of poor play as both a punter and kicker. Within days of being cut, Little was in a car accident, which left him a quadriplegic.
True enough. But, at the top levels of football, it isn’t enough to be good.
To play in the NFL, you must be one of the 30 best people in the world at what you do. To play at a top-level FBS college, you must be one of the top two or three people (in the college age bracket) in your state. Few people satisfy both of the college criteria; no one in the last three decades has satisfied both for the pros.
Since the Erxleben and Little fiascos, Chris Gardocki has been one of the few kickers even discussed as a two-way prospect for the NFL. But the Bears, who drafted Gardocki, already had a good PK in Kevin Butler and Gardocki never did anything other than punt as a pro.
I was going to correct you and say there are 32 NFL teams, but then I realized that two of them are the Jaguars and Buccaneers. So I think this number is accurate.
I just noiticed ElvisL1ves beat me by one minute… :smack: i still found him on my own, though! It was a pretty good google-fu that found him, so I was impressed with myself. Never fails that someone else put here would remember the guy and post a link before I got to him. Oh, well. Way to go, ElvisL1ves!
I remembered him because i was amazed that someone would take a kicker that high, and he never lived up to his draft pick. If you look at that draft, some guy named Kellen Winslow was drafted two spots later, so you don’t have to wonder why Saints fans wore bags on their heads.
I remember in college he kicked the longest FG in history at the time, which was 67 yards, according to Wiki. I din’t know if that record is still his, (Wiki implies it was tied once, but for some reason my brain is telling me someone broke it recently… Within the past 10 years). Anyway, he could kick record-breaking FG’s and he was a three-time All-american punter, so he looked like a pretty good bet to succeed in the NFL.
He was also a straight on kicker, which may be why he could double as a punter. I used to screw around as a kid and kick FG’s and punt footballs with my friends, and they are definitely two different skills and they use different muscles if you kick off like I do (soccer style). I have no idea if kicking straight on is using the same muscles as punting, bit it looks like it would.
I think he was one of the last straight-on kickers ever drafted. I think Mark Mosley kicked after Erxleben’s career was over, but not sure.
His post NFL-career is sad. He was just arrested again for allegedly running a ponzi scheme.
You hit the nail on the head with why he couldn’t kick FG’s in the pros. Colleges at the time were permitted to use a one inch tee to kick from. So the holder on FG’s would place the ball on top of a hard rubber block, making it MUCH easier to kick fg’s, especially long ones. The pros have no tee, and like you said, his high draft number put a ton of pressure on the guy. He could never live up to that pressure.
I didn’t know Little’s story. That was sad to learn.
I should also note that this is all just an illustration of how players in the NFL have become more specialized over time.
Before around 1960, it was uncommon for a team to have a player who only handled kicking or punting duties – these were nearly always handled by a player who normally played another position. (Lombardi’s early Packer teams had guard Jerry Kramer or halfback Paul Hornung doing the kicking, and ends Max McGee or Boyd Dowler doing the punting.)
As the 1960s went on, teams started using full-time specialists, and some of those players did, indeed, act as both kickers and punters.
But, at that same time, soccer-style placekicking emerged in the NFL. Most of the early soccer-style kickers were, in fact, soccer players (frequently from Europe), who had not played American football at all before coming to the U.S. as kickers; while they took over the kicking game in the NFL over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, very few (if any) of them wound up becoming punters.
Your typical NFL team in the early-to-mid 1970s had a placekicker who was probably originally a soccer player, may not have been born in the U.S., and had limited experience with punting a football. Thus, despite the fact that the teams were committed to fielding full-time specialists, there weren’t many top-of-the-line kickers who were also top-of-the-line punters…and, so, they had separate roster positions for kickers and punters.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s (Erxleben’s era), American-born soccer-style placekickers were entering the league in force, and (obviously) some of them had been both kickers and punters in college. The few experiments such as Erxleben’s that NFL teams tried failed miserably, and I suspect that they helped cement the conventional wisdom that the two jobs should be handled by separate players.
One thing that the specialization has done is led to far greater accuracy in the kicking game, and far greater distances in the punting game. Up until the 1970s, NFL kickers typically succeeded at ~60% of their field goal tries, and ~90% of their extra-point tries. Today, a kicker who had those sort of numbers would be very quickly out of a job – the modern averages are over 80% for field goals, and 99% for extra points. Similarly, in the 1970s, punters averaged around 40 yards per punt; today, it’s around 45 yards.
Why aren’t softball pitchers professional bowlers? How come baseball pitchers aren’t darts champions?
Not to dispute your overall point, but some of the difference in FG accuracy might be related to a rules change in which a missed FG gets turned over at the point of the kick versus the line of scrimage. This might have tended to discourage lower percentage kicks.
It sounds like it’s a waste of a roster spot, but when you really look at it, it’s not.
First, in general, most placekickers and punters probably have done both, even if they don’t still do both often, so each either can serve as a backup if one gets injured. This alone probably makes it worthwhile, because if you don’t have a serviceable backup, you’re stuck with whoever you can find to fill those spots or facing some really tough coaching decisions.
Second, they may not play a lot of downs, but they’re still crucial positions. Special teams play a huge role in field position and scoring. Every year there’s stories that evolve by the end of the season for how a 12-4 team won a lot of close games, or a 6-10 team could be 9-7 if only they’d not missed a few field goals. So you just have to have top-tier talent in those positions, and someone who splits between the two at that level just is unlikely to be as good as someone who specializes on one.
Third, carrying one spot for kicker and punter rather than one for each isn’t hurting the roster that much. You’re talking about replacing your 8th DB or your 7th receiver or 3rd TE or whatever. In that regard, I think it’s pretty clear that having a specialized kicker and a specialized punter will provide more impact for the roster spot. After all, unless you have a whole string of injuries in a single game, if you lose 2 or 3 DBs, you’ll probably pick up a free-agent anyway rather than keeping that extra one just in case.
So yeah, I think between having a suitable backup, the benefit of specializing, and compared to the alternative personel for that roster slot it makes sense. Hell, some teams even go further with highly specialized players. I’ve seen some teams have a separate kicker for kick-offs than for field goals. I’ve also seen teams have a separate return man for kick-offs and punts, though generally they are typically also a backup receiver and the punt returner is still usually part of the kick-off return.