The Godfather of Special Teams Explains the NFL’s Shocking Surge in Blocked Kicks

The Godfather of special teams has been taking calls. 

When he is not out on his boat catching sharks off the coast of Florida—last Thursday he nabbed two hammerheads and a blacktip—he is watching field goals, kickoffs, punts and returns. He is talking to a handful of special teams coordinators from his coaching tree. Guys who played for him. Guys who grew up in the NFL like Mike Westhoff did, having to make it on the game’s fringes. 

Westhoff, who retired from the NFL at age 77 after working last year as the assistant head coach of the Broncos, once went up to Deion Sanders and told him that, “If you had to play against me every week, you’d be a greeter at Walmart,” meaning that Sanders wouldn’t have been able to return so many kicks or punts throughout his career. He’s an Ed Block Courage award winner, a bone cancer survivor and all-around badass. 

Now? Part-time therapist. Through the first three weeks of the NFL season, 12 total field goals, extra points and punts were blocked. Then in Week 4, the Eagles took a blocked punt to the house for a touchdown. The Bears blocked a potential game-winning field goal attempt by the Raiders. The Cowboys blocked a Packers extra point attempt and returned it for a two-point conversion. These are all major game-altering occurrences stemming from a facet of the game that was formerly an afterthought.

“Absolutely,” Westhoff says when asked whether the coordinators reaching out are scrambling. “Yes they are. Yes they are.”

He continues: “They’re nervous because they know: That’s the last thing you want is that blocked field goal. And then they run for a touchdown. You lose a game. Whoa.” 

While there have been numerous breakdowns of each block, showcasing players literally holding the heads of snappers down like a bully in the school bathroom, flying off the edge like Jimmy Snuka or sprinting through holes so big that the 77-year-old himself claims he could get a hand on the ball, Westhoff believes there are deeper holistic issues at play that are finally causing the surge in game-altering rejections.

Here is his inside look into the root cause of a September rife with deflected kicks that may roll into a full-on BlockTober. 

As kickers stretch to the inevitable gold-standard 70-yard field goal, which a handful can already hit in warmups and the Jaguars’ Cam Little drilled in a preseason game, Westhoff says the onus has been pushed increasingly onto the kicker himself and not the orchestra of the operation. Over time, because snappers aren’t allowed to be hit, the snaps have gotten as close to perfect as humanly possible. The same goes with holds, which makes sense given that the snaps are better.

This means that, along with attempting longer kicks, which require just a bit more umph in the lead-up to the ball, kickers have become accustomed to more efficiency and operating in a space in which they are allowed to utilize the extra time it takes to generate more power into the kick. 

Ideally, Westhoff says, you want a snap-to-hold time of 1.3 seconds. He referenced the Bears’ Week 4 game in particular as an operation that looked slower. Sure enough, after multiple attempts at timing the snap to kick on my own personal stopwatch, I was getting between 1.35 and 1.41 seconds. 

Along those same lines, longer kicks require lower trajectories, which means kickers who are routinely attempting longer kicks in practice and pregame warmups may naturally tend to drive the ball lower on a more consistent basis, similar to a baseball player who develops a kind of upward trajectory home run swing. 

“You’ve got to hit your driver now,” Westhoff says. “Not your 9-iron.” 

In the Bears-Raiders game, Chicago overloaded two Raiders protectors—defensive lineman Jonah Laulu and Will Putnam, the team’s reserve center. 

In a Week 1 Seahawks-49ers tilt, Seattle went after Matt Hennessy, San Francisco’s backup center, and pummeled him to the ground, breaking loose the gap between Hennessy and tight end Jake Tonges. 

In the Week 3 Eagles-Rams game that featured two blocked field goals, the Rams even switched up their interior blockers—the same space that allowed both blocked kicks. On the first one, starting offensive tackle and guard Rob Havenstein (who was also targeted on a blocked extra point against the Titans) and Kevin Dotson were on the field. In the second, it was Havenstein and reserve center Beaux Limmer matching up against the tandem of Jalen Carter and Jordan Davis. 

In the Week 3 Browns-Packers game, Cleveland targeted Tucker Kraft, who, while one of the better receiving tight ends in the NFL, is not known for his blocking. 

Westhoff noted that as soon as attrition starts to hit the offensive line, this is like a sieve and speaks to larger problems about roster construction and the premium general managers place on backup offensive linemen. Typically, this is an area to save money, especially when the team has to pay a premium for other positions such as quarterback, edge rusher, corner and left tackle. 

But, issue No. 2 bleeds into issue No. 3, which seems to be the genesis of the entire block party. 

Essentially, defenses are leaving out their starting defensive line, edge rushers, linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties against offensive lines composed of nine blockers. This means, in effect, that on every single kick, you have the opportunity to put your best defensive player on a team’s ninth-best blocker (this should also take into account the fact that, as Westhoff says, long snappers are now the size of “high school phys ed teachers” and are not sizable enough to contribute to a blocking scheme in a meaningful way). I imagine that one day, this notion hit a wave of coordinators like a punch to the kidney: We’re getting the equivalent of Maxx Crosby against a third-string backup defensive tackle who isn’t really all that sure how to block four times a game. 

And, that third-string defensive tackle has no time to learn how to block field goals in practice because, if you’re lucky over the course of a season, you may get roughly 12 minutes of live, padded blocking practice in a week. Again, that’s if you’re conducting a padded practice. Typically, there might be four or five non-padded reps per practice total. 

“Can I work on your technique and your fundamentals and make sure you’re doing exactly right? Yes, I can,” Westhoff says. “But do I have that 315-pound, six-foot-six guy over there that’s trying to knock you in the face? No.”

The Eagles’ second blocked kick—the one Davis returned for a touchdown—is the perfect example of this. On the play, Carter and Davis were doing a kind of corkscrew motion that is only distantly applicable to any other football play. When is the Rams’ reserve center—already a bad mismatch against two of the best and most athletically gifted interior players in the NFL—going to learn the nuances of this corkscrew motion outside of film study? And how is he going to practice it before the game? 

This is essentially the soil in which the block party has grown. Similar to NFL teams uncovering the fact that defensive coordinators don’t have the time or the bodies to change their hand signals (so they steal, database and plan against them) or that NFL defenses became too light to handle a counter to 12-personnel (or, like the Rams, bigger and more physical wide receivers) it’s an advantage that has developed over a longer period of time and is the consequence of dozens of ancillary factors. 

Add in the kickers, armed with friendlier balls, loftier expectations and the undercurrent of offenses increasingly leaning on them to bail them out after drives that don’t extend far past midfield, and it only makes sense that more focus would be placed on stopping it. And once that focus was honed, all the tiny imperfections plaguing kick and punt units for years have now been given the yucky hotel black light treatment. 

I joked with Westhoff that now, a punt or field goal block is the only way for a special teams coordinator to make it on television. He said he used to love his television time—“I used to like it; I was always doing the good s—”—but knows that the landscape has changed. 

“Now their backs are against the wall a little bit,” he says. “People are figuring it out.”

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