Brandon Fields' Punting Performance Against the Jets Was Great, But Not Greatest
By Jason Lisk
However, I don’t have Fields’ day ahead of Mike Scifres of the Chargers against the Colts in the 2008 Wildcard game. I’ll get to how I measure that shortly, but first, some much needed discussion of punters. I would think that punter would be the easiest position to evaluate. Even though teammates still matter–they need to block, tackle the returner if there is no fair catch, and down the punts–I’m more confident that a punter’s numbers are a much greater reflection of the punter himself than the numbers that belong to any other position.
In the past, I’ve written about how the pro bowl selections appear to be based on the wrong criteria. Pro bowls seem to go to the punter who plays in good weather conditions on a bad offensive team with a high gross average. I also talked about punts inside the twenty and trying to better measure short field punts. My preferred method of evaluating punters and coverage teams is to look at the net punting yards, and then adjust for field position. From inside their own 40, punters strive for raw distance combined with hang time, and don’t really have to be concerned with touchbacks. Past their own 40, we see that net punting averages begin to decline because of the shortened field and threat of touchbacks. To normalize the two types of punts, I measure a punting average based on how many yards the punter has to work with. For full field punts, inside their own 40, I divide the net punting yards by a denominator of 60. From beyond the 40, net punting yards is divided by the distance remaining to end zone, minus 1.
For example, a punt from the 20 yard line that nets 40 yards would get a score of 0.667. A punt from the opponent’s 40 that was fair caught at the 10 would score 0.769 (30 net yards divided by 39 available yards), so that punt, which is an above average result from the 40 (average is closer to 25 net yards), is scored as better than a net 40 yard punt, which is a slightly below league average result from deep in one’s own territory.
When you look at Fields’ game versus Scifres’ game, it appears they are similar, with 51.7 net yards for Scifres versus 49.6 for Fields. The difference is where the punts occurred. Fields has a punting average, by my method above, of 0.827 (which exactly translates to 49.6 divided by 60 because all of his punts were inside his own 40). Scifres, meanwhile, had that insane net average despite many punts coming from near midfield. Scifres scored an incredible 0.937 on his 6 punts.
Fields had a great day, but Shane Lechler scored a 0.753 over the entire season, so he wasn’t way out in front considering that his long punts often resulted in returns of 10+ yards. For those that just love their punter statistics, here is how each team ranked last year by my method. (I’ll probably do this again after this season). One of the things that has seemingly been on my to do list for a while is to create some park factors for punters, because you will probably notice that, like most years, the top of the list is overpopulated by teams playing in domes or moderate weather conditions.