The punt, someone cool once said, is the most important play in football. That's probably not actually true, but to admit that you feel that way in the crazy workaday world that we live in is in my humble opinion the very definition of heroism.
Maybe even more so now, because Ohio State finds itself on the precipice of one of the most ridiculous quarterback battles in the history of college football. For the next few months, we will yell and scream and cry and pout while we try and reach some kind of consensus as to which otherworldly athlete deserves to be the face of the Buckeye brand. Will it be J.T. Barrett, the college football equivalent of Hannibal from the A-Team? Will it be Cardale Jones, the human equivalent of a Sherman tank? Or will it be Braxton Miller, who is in fact an actual witch? The sporting world waits with baited breath as Urban Meyer carefully weighs the pros and cons of this potentially make-or-break decision.
But not me, baby. The way I see it, there are way more pressing issues to be determined. Namely, what's the punting game going to look like, and how much punting can I expect to see in 2015? Bearing in mind that the only acceptable answers are "amazing" and "a whole dang lot," I've noticed a chilling pattern in Urban's teams over the years, and that is a distinct lack of kicking the ball on 4th down to the other team, allowing them to return it unless it is downed by the kicking team (known colloquially as a "punt").
| TOTAL PUNTS | PUNTS PER GAME | TOTAL PUNTING YARDS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-2014 | 156 | 3.8 | 6741 |
| 2009-2011 | 176 | 4.5 | 6894 |
It's a disturbing downward trend for a team that once revered the punt, and only seems to be getting worse. In four games last season the Buckeyes only punted once, robbing those games of any real entertainment value and ruining the dreams of thousands of young children gathered at Ohio Stadium to see the mighty OSU team complete the holy equation of ball to foot.
So my mission became clear: preserve good punting for posterity. Step one, write a weird and lengthy 11W article about why I think punting is rad. Check. Step two, ask Jon Thoma and Ben Buchanan to recall their very favorite punts in their careers:
@Johnny11W the first two punts of my career vs UM in '08. One inside the 10, one downed at the 1. Everything is better against them.
— Jonathan Thoma (@JonThoma) June 25, 2015
I really, really want to get video of this, because a perfect punt in a blowout game against your rival is one of the greatest things in the world.
I would say a 60 yarder vs the @MiamiHurricanes at @SunLifeStadium in 2011. @ZDomicone16 downed it on the 3 yd line! https://t.co/cHukOjnpYy
— Ben Buchanan (@BenBuchanan_17) June 25, 2015
And a ridiculous 60 yard punt downed within the 5 yard line might come close to that.
See, Thoma and Buchanan just perfectly explained why I genuinely love punting. I can say with only slight hyperbole that seeing in person Cameron Johnston's Punt of Death against Indiana last season, which traveled about 45 yards in the air and then landed and died like a duck full of bird shot within the Hoosier 5-yard line, continues to be one of the absolute highlights of my life so far. And as much as Alabama was and continues to be imminently hateable, if you weren't impressed by Tide punter JK Scott almost single-handedly keeping them in the game, you're a sad person with no soul, forever condemned to walk this earth bearing the mark of Joe Tiller. For me, there is legit fun and joy in what most people consider to be a small part of the game.
That's why I find it weird that in such a highly specialized sport like football, we rag on guys for developing a difficult skill like punting. We joke when they get laid out on a return and complain when they shank a kick, and go out of our way to portray them as anything but a "real" member of the football team. They're the nerds, the unathletic, the goofy marginal players that are just trying to use the equation of "ball plus foot multiplied by four times a game equals I might get laid at my friend's party without the inherent risk of brain damage." It's a dumb lie that we tell ourselves so that we can feel superior to guys who have still put more time and effort into learning a skill than most people will ever put into learning anything else.
So one of the things that I loved about being an Ohio State fan during the Jim Tressel era is that we all felt contractually obligated to love the punt. That happened maybe in part because Tressel was its biggest advocate at a time where the Chip Kellys and Pete Carrolls and yes, even the Urban Meyers of the world were dismantling traditional football brick by brick, and maybe in part due to some kind of kicking-induced Stockholm Syndrome. Whatever the reason, it gave being a Buckeye a weird and kind of unique badge of honor, to be the only college fanbase where more people might know the names of the players on the kicking team than on the defensive line.
That's only part of it, though. What really makes punting great is the visceral thrill of just kicking the absolute hell out of something.
Guys like Ben Buchanan and Jon Thoma and Cameron Johnston and a billion other guys practice their art like a Renaissance master meticulously studying brush techniques, so I don't pretend to think that me or you could ever approach what they were and are able to do. There's a difference between "kicking" and "punting," and that difference is what keeps the majority of us on the couch on Saturdays as the Philistines among us scoff and yell that we could do that too before cracking open another seven beers and passing out during a WAC game.
Still, I'll leave you with this story. A year or so ago, I was downtown at Columbus Commons with a group of my high school students. I'm a 30-year-old man who is starting to understand in exactly what ways my body is going to betray me in the future, so the idea that I can keep up with some reasonably athletic teenagers in a game of two hand touch football was wrong as hell. At some point my team had to punt, and suddenly all the jockeying over who got to have the ball was gone. Nobody wanted the job of kicking it to the other team and potentially looking like a wiener, so of course it fell to the only semi-adult playing to do it.
For the 4 or 5 seconds that the half inflated peewee football hung in the air, I understood. Maybe you're envisioning your boss' head. Maybe you're thinking of that time you tried to ask a girl out but she said no because you had braces. Maybe you just remembered that you forgot to pay the electric bill and you had been really wanting to use electricity that week. Whatever the reason, the fun of just clobbering something with your foot as hard as you can is something that anybody, anywhere can relate to. It's an awesome, universal feeling, and if you squint real hard you too can live vicariously through Cam Johnston and whoever else might be having the kind of fun that you wish you could on a regular basis.
These days it's super easy to get enamored with everything else that an Urban Meyer football team brings to the table scheme wise and athletically. But I hope that in the build up to the 2015 season, we don't forget about the humble, simple, beautiful punt, which ever remains football's most important play.
