Let me rant on this.. special teams does not make up a third of the game… on average its under 1/5th of the game. Last year 17% of our plays happened on special teams…
Lets round up and say it’s a fifth of the game… of that fifth of a game, about a fifth of that is field goal kicking, which is basically offense with a couple players switched out…
Of the rest, half are returns and the other have are return defense… because these aspects have been minimized in the current game, the actual statistic impact of them is miniscule.
Depending on the team, Somewhere around 40 to 80% of kickoff returns are touchbacks and 20 to 30% of punts are fair caught.
Its easy to get caught up in the yardage stats, but here is the bottom line a bad kickoff or punt coverage unit aren’t going to vary a lot from a great one. A bad unit might surrender 1 or 2 tds a year and factor in on a couple of other scores, but even good units occasionally do that as well… the average starting position for great punt and kick return units will usually be in the 26-30 yard range… bad units will be in the 22-25 yard range…
I can’t discern the advantage of keeping more than one or two coverage specialists for special teams over a higher end backup at a key position like Olb…
Especially when you look at graphs for our special teams the past half decade or so… they are chronically average to below average
