Another Punting Post

So it turns out Dirk Johnson isn't a very good punter, either. 

We already knew he wasn't much of a holder, since we saw David Akers struggle to adjust to him last year and we watched him get benched for the playoffs in favor of Koy Detmer, who -- amazingly -- still happened to be available.

But I always thought Dirk was a decent punter.  I knew he wasn't a true bomber, but my anecdotal recollection was that he had become a good, reliable NFL punter until he got hit with the injury bug in 2005 and struggled with some consistency issues last year. 

Oops, not so much.

Punting stats are tricky to compare, because you can't just look at gross and net (minus returns and touchbacks) and go from there.  Some guys play for terrible teams so they get lots of chances to air it out from their own half of the field, for example, while punters on better teams have to make do more often with pooching it down there inside the 20-yard-line.

So instead I pulled the situational stats for all the punters last season to allow me to do an apples-to-apples comparison.  You'll notice, if you click that link, that NFL.com gives stats for various places on the field.  For my purposes, I considered "long punts" to be any time the punter was within his own 20-yard-line, because there was almost no chance of a pooch punt.  My guess is that this is the best measure of a guy's true leg strength, since his job is basically to kick it as far as he can. 

For pooching ability, I considered anything between the 50 and the opposing team's 20-yard line.  In that situation, it's not much about leg strength, but all about pinning the other team deep.  Using those stats, and doing some comparative rankings, yielded the following chart:

(full excel sheet available here)

Dirk was hurt for most of 2005, so I didn't include that year.  I've highlighted in green all the areas where Dirk has exceeded the league average.  Which means you can easily see that there's not one category last year where he was better than average. 

He ranked 24th in gross punting and 29th in net.  He kicked the ball too far into the end zone for a touchback fully 14 percent of the time.  His percentage of punts that kept the other team inside the 20-yard-line hasn't been better than average since 2003 (the modified percentage only counts punts made outside the punter's own 20-yard line, to better control for real opportunities).

His "long gross" stat has increased every year, suggesting that his leg is getting stronger ... but he's still below the league average.

His percentage of short punts that end up pinning the opponent within the 20-yard-line was 50 percent.  That means that on only half of his 18 attempts kicking from the opponent's half of the field was he able to keep them inside the 20.  That's abysmal.

But what's worse is that -- contrary to what I thought I remembered -- Dirk hasn't ever really been that good.  His best league rank for net punting is only 14th.  His best gross for 24th (or 15th if you only go by long punts).  And he's never been better than average at pooch-punting to keep the other guys pinned deep.

Maybe Saverio Rocca has more of a shot than I realized.   

Comments

[McTumms]

I remember when he was a restricted FA and the Ravens brought him in for a visit. It was a little surprising then, but also oddly disconcerting--not in a "what will we ever do without Dirk Johnson" way, more of a "this sucks a bit because he looks like he's developing" way. (In other words, I think a lot of people would sympathize with your initial perception, and I'd be one of them.) So much for projections. Go, Sav!! (How can't a guy learn to be an adequate holder? I'm not saying it's easy, but come on...)