On Saturday the Vols lined up and played something that looked like football against something called Western Carolina University. This was not an exciting game. WCU was paid $500,000 to come to Knoxville to get knocked around. At one point the commentators noted how good the money would be for WCU. Catamount Head Coach Mark Speir said, “A game like this will send 32 football players to school at Western Carolina.”
In the wake of the loss to OU, it’s nice to think that the University of Tennessee is making 32 lives a little better.
Discerning anything from a game against an FCS opponent is nearly impossible. Coaches tend to run vanilla schemes and base formations in these kinds of game. As was said many times throughout Saturday’s matchup, the game was to evaluate fundamentals and give understudies a chance to play something that resembles a real game. It’s also pretty easy to imagine that the starters were looking ahead to the game against Florida next week. Given that, I don’t want to dwell on any major parts of the game. I didn’t see much that would add or detract from my evaluation of the team after the Oklahoma game.
Instead I would like to make:
The Case for Trevor Daniel
Punters aren’t guys who get noticed. There are many unsung positions on a football team. More often than not a less than rabid fan won’t notice an offensive lineman until a lineman is called for holding. Even rabid fans would have a hard time naming the common special teams players beyond the kickers and returners. But punters occupy an odd space. We know their names but other than in extreme cases, we don’t notice them or even know when to notice them.
The punter is the only player that no one wants. The punter enters play when a team has failed. His only job is to give the ball to the other team. His entire person is surrender. I’m writing about the position, and even I hope that UT doesn’t punt once next week. A team scoring points has no reason to punt. So we spurn the punter.
But why? We know that football is a game of field position. We know that punting is part of the game, but many of us have thought, “just go for it” a hundred more times than we’ve thought, “this is a good place to punt.” And when we have thought about the merits of deciding to give the other team the ball, most often those thoughts are compensatory. It is a concession judged in terms of how much worse it could be.
It doesn’t help that we judge the merit of a punter by yardage. It’s comical that in the day of sabermetrics and smart fans, we still judge a guy solely by how far he can kick a ball. This should annoy us as much as when we hear a QB praised just because he has a strong arm. (I’m nearly certain that Tyler Bray has a much stronger arm than Peyton Manning, but whom would you rather have? For anything? Even if it were a backyard rock throwing competition, wouldn’t you rather chance losing to hangout with Manning rather than probably win and hangout with Bray?)
A strong leg is good. I don’t dispute that when kicking from your own twelve, you want a guy who can kick the hell out of the pig. Obviously the same logic isn’t true forty yards up field. The goodness of a seventy-yard punt is wholely based on a team’s field position. So lets talk about giving up and lets talk about a man who is great at giving the other team the ball.
I give you Trevor “White Elephant” Daniel. Daniel is #93 in your program and #1 in your hearts because if UT is going to give the ball to the other team you want Mr. Daniel to do it. A punt from Mr. Daniel is a burdensome gift that no one really wants.
White Elephant hails from Dickson, TN, a small suburb of Nashville. At Dickson County High he kicked (punter), caught (tight end), and sacked (defensive end) his way to letterman status for three years. Daniel is majoring in Recreation and Sports Management, which means he plans on being drafted into the NFL.
Currently Daniel’s average punt goes for 47.6 yards. That’s good enough for 2nd in the SEC. That is a pretty nice average through three games, but judging by this traditional criterion, Daniel is far behind the fist place spot. In first is Texas A&M’s Drew Kaser. On ten punts Kaser averages a booming 52.7 yards. That’s a pretty insane number. Kaser has a rocket launcher for a leg. If punting were actually a distance competition, we’d have a winner.
We don’t have a winner. We have a guy who can kick a ball very far. We have the leg version of Tyler Bray. Do you want Tyler Bray at your barbeque? You know he’s going to drink too much and rip his shirt off. He’s going to point to the tattoo on his back and scream, “What’s it say?! What’s it say?!” Nobody wants that. You know what else no one wants? To start a drive inside their own twenty-yard line.
The cliché is football is a game of field position. Gaudy stats are nice. Eighty-yard drives are time consuming and wearing on the other team’s defense, but if the offense drove eighty yards from their own ten, it’s not quite as good as driving thirty yards from the other team’s seventy. One (probably) results in a field goal and the other in a touchdown. We should look at punts the same way. A fifty yard punt doesn’t help if your offense is at the opponent’s 49.
So if the point of punting is to put the other team in the worst possible position lets judge punters by how disadvantageous the position they leave the opposing team in is. Instead of the average distance, we’ll judge punters by the opposing team’s average starting position after the punt.
I’ll start with the reigning leader in the SEC, Drew Kaser. In Kaser’s ten punts he has pinned his opponents inside their own 20 four times, leaving them to start at their 11, 13, 14, and 6 yard lines. He’s forced them to start at the 20 once. Otherwise he’s left them starting okay at the 36, 37, 25, 40, and 38. That comes to an average starting field position of 24. Starting from the 24-yard line isn’t great but certainly sounds far less scary than a punter who averages 52 yards per punt.
We need context for this number. It works out well that the SEC’s middle of the pack punter is Florida’s Johnny Townsend. Townsend is averaging 41.4 yards per punt. That puts him eighth out of the fifteen punters in the SEC who’ve punted at least three times. (It’s not exactly the middle, but we’re playing Florida next week so I’m going to use him because of that.) Townsend has punted twelve times and pinned his opponents inside the 20 twice (8, 2). Offenses have been left to start from the 20 twice. His other punts have varied widely (22, 26, 27, 30, 31, 34, 43, 48). If you’re playing against Florida you can expect your average start to be seventy-four yards from pay dirt. That is the 26-yard line. So the leader by average distance is only two yards better than the middle of the pack punter by average starting position.
Maybe forcing an opponent to start at their own 24 is good. Maybe we live in a world where that is the best as can hope for as we cede position to our foes. Friends we do not live in that world. Those who don orange and white, you have a hero with a leg like a pendulum that swings with mathematical accuracy! Trevor Daniel is that hero. Daniel is by no means weak legged. He has boomed a couple of sixty-one yard punts. What is most thrilling is his touch, his ability to arc the ball into the air and drop it inside the opponent’s 20. Daniel has done this eight times (12, 9, 3, 14, 6, 11, 11, 6) Eight times in sixteen punts. That Daniel is placing the ball inside the 20 half the time he punts is amazing, but add to that the range of these kicks. The distance of those eight punts ranges from thirty-four to fifty-two yards, which should clearly illustrate the intentionality of his kicks. He’s pegging the opposing offense in the shadow of their goal posts from all over the field. In Daniel’s other kicks he’s twice put the ball at the 20. Otherwise his kicks have left teams at the 22, 26, 26, 44, 40, and 31. Those starts beyond the 20 include the two times he has launched a ball sixty-one yards to leave it at the 26. If you’ve done the math, Daniel is forcing teams to start from the 19-yard line, on average. That is five yards farther back than average distance leader Kaser and seven yards better than middle of the roader and next week’s opposing punter Townsend.
And that, my friends, turns out to be a pretty big difference. Teams starting from the 20-yard line score some points about a little less than a quarter of the time. This year a good SEC punter puts his defense in position to only give up points a little more than one in four times, about 26%. Trevor “White Elephant” Daniel puts the Vols defense in position to give up points one in five times. Yes, stats bear out that teams starting inside their own 20-yard line score only 20% of the time. A quarter versus a fifth. That is a pretty nice edge.
In short, go here. Type “93” then “Daniel.” Click “Add to Cart” and buy. Pull the jersey over your head and pretend your leg is a pendulum of field advantage that leaves your foes in a pit of woe.
Rocky Top Exile 