Written By Sam Ekstrom
The move to the outdoors wasn’t kind to second-year punter Jeff Locke in 2014.
Brought in to replace veteran Chris Kluwe, who had an unsavory falling out with the team, Locke put together a decent 2013 in the Metrodome’s farewell season, posting middle-of-the-pack numbers in terms of net yardage, touchbacks, kicks inside the 20-yard line and total kicks returned. But 2014, a year in which the Vikings played all but three games outside, Locke took a significant step back.
To be clear, and somewhat elementary, the goal for punters is to get the ball as far down field as possible without outkicking their coverage and, ideally, without allowing any return yardage. To simplify, some numbers you want low, some you want high. Touchbacks aren’t great, so you want those low. They are the equivalent of having the opponent return the ball 20 yards when they should be downed inside the 10-yard line instead. Balls downed inside the 20 are coveted because they obviously pin the opponent deep in their own territory; those numbers should be high. Fair catches are good, too. It means the punt had good hangtime, and the coverage team gunned down the field quickly to prevent a return.
Locke was in the wrong half of the league in close to every category last season, and he saw regression across the board from his rookie year. His six touchbacks were tied for ninth most in the league, one of which occurred just before Buffalo’s game-winning drive in Week 7. Those six touchbacks were also twice as many as he posted in 2013. He saw his punts inside the 20 shrink from 23 to 21, fair catches down from 20 to 19 and net yardage down from 39.2 to 38.7.
Finally, Locke’s total punts returned rose from 36 to 39, equaling 52 percent of his total attempts. He was one of only five punters in the NFL above 50 percent (the others: Tress Way, Bryan Anger, Brandon Fields and Pat McAfee).
Why is this important?
Basically, any time a punt is returned, there is a risk of the ball carrier taking it all the way – not a great one, mind you, but a chance nonetheless. One in 78 returned punts were taken to the house last season (13 of 1,016), which is just over 1 percent. However, only one of the 13 teams that allowed a punt return against ended up winning the game. Punt returns can have game-changing ramifications. The Rams pulled off upsets over Denver and Seattle last year, thanks in part to punt return touchdowns. Buffalo also knocked off Green Bay with the help of a Marcus Thigpen return.
To draw a conclusion here, the more punts that are returned, the more chances there are that one gets taken back for a TD and swings a valuable game during a short season. For this reason, yardage isn’t all that important; more vital is reducing return opportunities, a philosophy Chris Kluwe claimed was the reason his stats declined at the end of his career. Arguably the best punter in this regard last season was Seattle’s Jon Ryan, who had lower total yardage and net yardage numbers than Locke, but allowed just 17 returns in 61 attempts (28 percent) – granted, one was returned for a touchdown via this incredible trick play by St. Louis.
With one Vikings specialist already fighting for his job in camp (long snapper Cullen Loeffler), a message has been sent by special teams coordinator Mike Priefer. Do your job well, or we’ll bring in competition. “Jeff’s got to be more consistent,” said Priefer during OTAs. “We could talk about weather ‘til we’re blue in the face — doesn’t matter. The opposing team’s kicking in the same weather, and we were outpunted a few times last year when I felt like we had the better punter.”
The winds proved to be more difficult than expected for the team’s kickers last year. According to Priefer, Locke attempted to alter his leg swing when kicking into the wind and occasionally overshot his target, resulting in returnable kicks and untimely touchbacks. Not only did Locke struggle at times, but placekicker Blair Walsh posted the lowest field goal percentage of his three-year career. Walsh said that the winds inside TCF Bank Stadium during several games were worse than he dealt with in Buffalo – one of the league’s notoriously blustery venues. Locke believed the winds at TCF Bank were deceiving. “Every stadium has its tendencies in terms of how the wind comes in, how it funnels through,” said Locke last season. “It’s just kind of knowing what the wind’s doing relative to what the flags are saying. That’s kind of what we go with.
“A lot of it is finding the right flag, what flag in the stadium is the true one that’s giving you the right wind that’s actually being played on the field.”
The offseason goal for Locke has been to work on a punting spiral that sails tighter through the wind; a “cut ball,” according to Priefer. “He’s got to be disciplined enough to have an approach that’s compact, nice and short, so he doesn’t try to kill the ball, and I think that will solve a lot of his problems this offseason,” Priefer said last week.
“The key to punting in any wind is pure contact,” Locke told Cold Omaha. “You’ve got to hit a very tight ball. The more the ball goes up in the air and starts wobbling around, the more the wind’s going to affect it because the surface area is greater on the ball.” Hearing a punter talk about their craft is like hearing an artist talk about their brush stroke or a golfer talk about their swing. It’s an action that takes little more than a second, but every motion has to be precise. Minnesota fans have surely heard announcers rave about Joe Mauer’s swing – its effortlessness and repeatability, to be exact. That’s what punters are shooting for, too. “I think a lot of punters will say you try to keep the swing the same no matter what,” Locke said. “You try to keep the swing consistent. You’re changing up where the ball is in relation to your swing, so it’s all about limiting the amount of variables that are going on in the swing, trying to change one thing at a time. So thinking about changing drop and swing and everything really gets nothing accomplished … You want to minimize everything that goes on.”
Locke and Walsh worked out at TCF Bank Stadium once a week last season to test the winds, and they’ll do the same again this year. Last training camp, Priefer praised the complexity of a chart his two kickers constructed that plotted the wind patterns within the horseshoe-shaped stadium, but Locke admits now that the chart was by no means a key to kicking success. “It has been tweaked,” said Locke, who revealed that the chart is an aerial picture of the stadium with lines drawn on it representing wind tendencies. “That was definitely a novice-before-playing-a-game-there chart, and then once we got a couple games we both have fairly detailed notebooks on what actually goes on there now.”
Priefer has expressed a great deal of faith in Locke this offseason, boasting that he is in the best shape of his career. It’s also possible that Locke’s punting style will suit the team well once they move back indoors for the 2016 season. According to the special teams coordinator, punting demands a greater learning curve than place kicking, which lends some optimism Locke’s way for Year 2 in the Frozen Tundra of TCF. “It takes longer for a punter than it does a place kicker to get all the different experiences, obviously a lot of different areas of the field they have to punt from, the different situations,” Priefer said in Mankato.
For a punter trying to improve in the wind, Mankato is the perfect place. The flat sports complex at Blakeslee Stadium is three football fields wide with virtually no obstructions, save the single level of bleachers on one end. Winds of 25 mph have wreaked havoc on special teams drills the past two weeks, but the specialists have embraced the challenge. “There’s no game we had that is as strong as this,” Walsh told Cold Omaha. “It’s good practice.”
For a veteran coach like Priefer who has seen some of the league’s best punters at work – Kluwe included – there seems to be a sensible level of understanding that the best punters make it look easy, but making it look easy is tremendously hard and takes years of patience. “I was fortunate enough to work with Jeff Feagles many years ago with the Giants,” Priefer recalled, “and Jeff told me — he punted for about 18 to 20 years, whatever it was (22, in actuality) — that after about Year 8 or 9, that’s when Jeff said, ‘You know what, I’ve finally figured this out.’”
Sam Ekstrom is a staff writer for Cold Omaha at 105 The Ticket and a play-by-play broadcaster in Burnsville, Minn. Hear him on 105 The Ticket Sunday mornings from 8-11 a.m. on “The Wake Up Call.” Follow him on Twitter @SamEkstrom for further insights.