Rocca Vs. Hester

If you're looking for ways the Eagles could blow a game to the Chicago Bears this week, it's not going to take long before you get to Devin Hester.  The guy is an absolute freak in the return game.  Here's a good old media piece on what the Eagles are facing.

But while everyone's wondering about how Eagles punter Sav Rocca is going to do against him -- he's not been the model of consistency so far -- I think there are a few key points to make here:

1. The best way to stop Hester is not to punt to him.  If the Eagles are finishing drives with points, they won't even need the punter to step on the field.

2. The second-best way to stop Hester is not to punt to him from deep in your own territory.  Short, high kicks are much harder to return because they give the coverage unit time to converge.  No three-and-outs from your own 20-yard-line.  In this regard, it's not a great sign that the Eagles have asked Rocca to punt five times from inside their own 20 and only once on the opponent's half of the field.

3. Rocca and the Eagles have been very good this year in minimizing returns.  Sav doesn't have the greatest averages, but if you look at the spread between his gross and net, he's top 10 right now in the league:

4. Even Rocca's "misses" so far have not been the kind of punts that would hurt him against Hester.  Take a look at this chart that breaks down every punt he's had so far this season:

(F- fair catch, D - downed, TB - touchback, R - returned, OOB - out of bounds)

When Rocca makes a "bad" kick -- under 40 yards -- it's generally not returnable.  (And based on the spots he's kicking them from, most of those have not been intentional pooch punts.)  I think this happens for a few reasons: a) returners have to respect the strength of his leg so they can't just camp short and assume the ball's coming there; b) his short kicks are generally pretty high, which gives the coverage team time to swarm; and c) the couple of true s----- he's had have gone to the sideline, making them pretty much impossible to return.

The one thing he has to avoid is the long, low, line drive kick.  That could be trouble. 

5. Finally, the Eagles shouldn't be letting this game come down to special teams.  Score some points, build a lead, and then if Hester brings one back, whew, ok we dodged a bullet.

Bonus note:  Did you know that the NFL does not subtract penalties that occur on a return into the net average statistics?  So if a returner takes one back eight yards but then his team gets penalized 10 yards for holding during the return, the eight-yard return still goes against the punter's net average stats. 

I discovered this when looking through Rocca's stats.  Hardly seems fair to the punters, since sometimes it's that very penalty that allowed the big return.

Comments

I agree with the TMQ column this week - kick it out of bounds. Why even take the chance, especially in cases when Rocca's punting from deep in the Eagles' territory?

[Me]

Two reasons I can think of:

1) Because Rocca's not the most experienced punter and there's a decent chance he'll end up mis-hitting it if he thinks too much about the sidelines.

2) Because there's playing smart and there's playing scared. Going into the game with the idea that you'll just kick out of bounds says you're scared. Not a good way to play football.

[whoismariowilliams]

I think we have to worry about getting him the ball on the offense. Without him, Berrian is probably the only one who's going to hurt you deep. But if they put him out there in a three wide look, you have two burners and really good veteran receiver.

If the team members see kicking out of bounds as playing scared, then I can understand why you wouldn't do it -- if it impacted players' moods and thus their play. But, looking at the stats, if Rocca is able to kick it far enough when shooting for out of bounds to make it, on average, better than Hester's usual return, kick it out. (Yikes, that's a bad sentence.) But the point is that if the stats work out, then it is smart. And if people who don't know the stats see it as playing scared, too bad. Given the Eagles' challenges in other games, better to be perceived as scared than give up a TD.

[Me]

I totally agree, we've just seen so many times where a punter trying to put the ball out of bounds ends up shanking it instead. Too bad we don't still have Feagles :)