To Punt or Not To Punt
The Presbyterian Blue Hose have sparked the eternal debate once more. Is punting worth it?
American football was invented in 1869, when the United States was still in the shadow of the Civil War. Over 150 years later, the game has morphed into an entity that is almost unrecognizable to the people who played in and watched that first game between Princeton and Rutgers. Football is a juggernaut in this country, whether it be on Friday nights in Texas with high school kids playing in stadia comparable to college programs, Saturdays with colleges staking big money on games that the players have only just started to be able to earn from, or Sundays with the NFL. Everyone loves seeing the bone-crunching hits (as problematic as they are with regards to player safety), free runners cutting on a dime to juke defenders out of their cleats, and huge pass plays that can change the tenor of a game. One play that only a select group of sickos (and I say this in the most loving way possible) enjoy is the act of the punt.
If football is to be described as a simulacrum of war, punting is the act of surrender. The attack stalls, and rather than make a last push that may or may not get you an advance, you act to push the enemy back from their siege in order not to give them a direct chance to set up shop within arm’s reach of your capital. It’s not ideal, but it’s the smart play if the goal is to keep the enemy from sacking your capital too much during this ersatz wargame. The capital, in this case obviously, is the end zone. Generally speaking, surrender is a tough pill to swallow even if it’s necessary.
However, NFL head coaches especially have given to surrendering at points in time where surrender was not needed. Punting has gotten a terrible rep, not just because it’s associated with inept and/or Stone Age offenses, but because coaches will use it in situations where a first down would be in reach with bold playcalling executed correctly. The act of punting has been stigmatized in modern circles past whatever negative connotations it had before now. One coach has eschewed the practice altogether in his radical attempt to combine football coaching with game theory.
Kevin Kelley had never coached a game above the high school level until Saturday, when he made his debut as the head coach for Presbyterian College in South Carolina. Taking on a hapless NAIA1 program, St. Andrews, that didn’t exist before 2017, Kelley’s Blue Hose racked up 84 points en route to a blowout victory, one in which they did not punt, kicked nothing but onside kicks, and went for two point conversions on all seven of their first 12 touchdowns of the day. It was this strategy that attracted Presbyterian, a school that itself had been members of the NAIA until 1992 and hadn’t joined Division I of the NCAA until 2008, to a high school coach. Kelley won a lot of games in Arkansas playing percentages and always being bold. Succeeding at the high school level is one thing, and beating up on a school that had no rights being on the field with a Division I college, whether or not they were members of the top tier (FBS) or the second one (FCS), isn’t as impressive.
Still, Kelley’s hiring shows that radical thought processes about gaming football are lurching upward. He had a gimmick, and that gimmick appealed to the people running the show at a college desperate to manufacture some relevance despite relative newness in the second-to-top tier of college football. However, these radical ideas do have merit. NFL head coaches punt too much. Some observers in places like Reddit might say that punting anything more than what Kelley does in a game is too much. Obviously, there’s nuance in the analysis that needs to be mined, but where is it? Is Presbyterian’s season going to be a referendum on punting no matter what the outcomes are?
The answer is that Kelley, as he’s been his entire coaching career, is an outlier who is going to prove some mediums through extremes. He’s going to show a lot of coaches’ asses when he goes for and gets a lot of 4th downs and fewer than five yards in the gray area between his and the other team’s 40-yard lines. What he’s not going to do is show punting is a false move regardless of field position. There are going to be games where he will cost the Blue Hose bigtime if he goes for a 4th-and-15 inside his own 20. There might be games where that gamble might pay off, but weighing risk is a worthwhile analysis to carry out whether or not you like the consequences of the action you’re taking. My guess is that no matter what the aggregate result, you will find cherrypicking, but that’s what passes for analysis these days.
Utter ghouls like Clay Travis will look at a vaccinated football in the NFL or FBS orbit contracting a breakthrough case of COVID-19 and crow about how vaccines are not worth it, not taking into account the infected person will statistically not be likely at all to have to be hooked up to a ventilator or even feel symptoms for more than a day if they feel them at all. It’s this extreme analysis that has been propagated by “news” sources who take extremes and frame them as normality in order to bend public opinion past reason. Granted, punting is not nearly as urgent a public health crisis as COVID-19, but the principles behind the arguments stay the same. You’re going to get a lot of people pointing out a time when Kelley goes for it with 20 yards to go only for the pass to fall incomplete, giving Stetson prime field position to beat the Blue Hose and end their FCS Playoff flirtations as the reason why Joe Judge is RIGHT, goddammit, to punt from the Eagles 48-yard line on 4th and 3 in a heartbreaking late November Giants loss.
Gathering to the extremes is a symptom of a polarizing society where gaming the populace makes cultural elites richer and richer by the day, but that doesn’t mean the answer is plum in the center. Generally, there are kernels of truth to more adventurous reads on any situation. As always, you need nuance, and sometimes, it doesn’t have to be a lot. Don’t think of any situation as linear. It’s more of a spectrum, and that spectrum is going to have components where boldness pays off anchored by restraint in key areas. It involves thought, and unfortunately, the nerds yelling at people on Fox News don’t know anything about thinking.
So to answer the question posed in the headline, to punt or not to punt, you have to think. Kevin Kelley is an experiment that frankly is needed at a higher level of football than high school in Arkansas, but he’s not going to be a test case for base imitation. If anything, he is an extreme control in one direction. Like I said above, he will make a lot of pro coaches feel extremely inadequate when they don’t go for it in the middle of the field on 4th and short. Then again, Doug Pederson showed how silly a lot of “traditional” coaches were during his run as Eagles head coach when he listened to the forward-thinking analyticist the team hired and went for it at a clip unheard of in the NFL. Part of that forward-thinking won the team a Super Bowl in 2017, and lifted them to the playoffs the next two years even as injuries devastated the team in ways that only an eldritch curse could explain. The rest of the league still hasn’t caught up. One has to wonder if that resistance to nuance and forethought has anything to do with it.
NAIA stands for National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, an organizing body for smaller institutions. In case you wanted to know how little the NCAA thinks of games against such small schools, none of the “records” Presbyterian set this past Saturday count officially.