"PUNT TEAM, GET READY!!"

 

Yeah, what do you think of when you hear that?
Oh crap....we sucked that series on offense, lets play some more defense I guess..

Not quite, if your special teams is up to the task

This is more fleshing out some notes and a previous post on special teams (here and here), but this video breakdown of HOW TO PRACTICE it should help.  I've been at places where we did our best to coach up our special teams units and did the lip service of "making them special".  By far the best way I've seen it utilized was at a program where we used special teams as warm up pre-practice for everyone.  We would work like 5 - 10 minutes of individual, segmented drills (in the video) then finish with 5 minutes of full unit practice.  The real benefit comes when you work half-line punt protection and segmented start in kickoff (first 20 yard sprint, 10 yard escapes, 30 yard pursuit / find).  With this true specialization comes the need to really coach details because these opportunities can change the course of the game against any opponent in under 2.5 seconds.

Here is video to chew on while we work on other projects.....