Danny Crossman – October 20, 2022
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Thursday, October 20, 2022
Special Teams Coordinator Danny Crossman
(WR Tyreek Hill had a punt return that was -2 yards. Should he have fielded that? The one that bounced.) – “Yeah, that’s two weeks in a row where he’s actually done a fabulous job at saving field position. The previous ball was a ball that wasn’t a great ball and he got on it before it rolled for another eight or 10 yards. Then the ball this past Sunday, the guy hits an absolute bomb, 73 yards, and he saved field position by getting on it. So he has two returns, each for -2 (yards), but both are good plays because he’s saving field position. That’s where stats sometimes tell you one thing but it probably saved us about 18 yards of field position on those two plays. We’ll take the -4 as opposed to -18.”
(Did it surprise you that S Jevon Holland muffed that punt early?) – “Any time that you – you never like to see it. I think he took a late peek. As he was coming over to fair catch, he got a little but of a cutter ball played from the outside in and he was looking outside in. It’s always a dangerous deal. It’s scary. But those things happen. Hopefully we don’t have many of those because those are the disaster plays that you have to avoid, but that’s another example of…”
(There’s been a lot of good plays but Head Coach Mike McDaniel said there’s other things that are just not the way you guys have wanted to go. When you get things that haven’t gone your way in so many areas of special teams, what do you do? How do you work on that? And are you dissatisfied with some of those things that have gone on?) – “The job is to help win games. That’s the job. When you have plays that are not leading to you and your club winning games, yeah. I don’t know if disappointing is the word. There are a lot of other words I would maybe use. But yeah, that’s not why you’re in it. Those are things you have to eliminate. Now, we also know that things come and go and there are ebbs and flows and that’s part of it. But we’ve got to be able to create some more plays. Our opportunities have been limited. We’ve had six punt returns for the year and two of them are Tyreek (Hill) saving field position, one of them is (Jevon) Holland on a muff that you just mentioned. So we’ve got three returns in six games. When we do get the opportunities, those are the things we’ve got to take advantage of. And then those plays we’ve got an opportunity to make a play, you’ve got to make it. If you get a chance to make a tackle, you make a tackle. If you don’t make a tackle, the next thing you know it’s 20 more yards of field position. You just keep grinding and stay with the fundamentals. We’ve got some guys moving around a little bit. But you’ve got to make plays when you’re in position to make plays. If we can just do that, we’ll be fine.”
(Punt returns are down across the league, I don’t know if you know that.) – “They’re not. But certain teams – the numbers play out but some teams have a boatload of them and some teams have hardly any of them. We’ve had so many plus-50 opportunities where we haven’t really gotten any opportunities. We’ve only had two real good chances for the year. Some of it is they hit a good ball. Or they hit a bad ball and you don’t get things. That’s just part of it. Those numbers will change and it will balance out. When we do get the opps, now is when we’ve got to make something happen.”
(We’ve grown accustomed to seeing K Jason Sanders hit field goals over 50 yards pretty consistently until this year. Has there been a common theme in the three misses that you’ve found?) – “There really hasn’t. This past week was the first one that was a bad ball. That was a bad hit. A lot of his other hits, as we’ve talked about, are just missed, off the upright or what have you. When we send him on the field, we expect points. That’s the nature of the beast. It doesn’t matter if it’s 52, 54 or 56 (yards), when we send him on the field, we expect to get points out of it. That kick was a rarity in my opinion. I can say that because I’m with him day in and day out and I watch and see every kick he makes. So that was a rarity. But the bottom line is it doesn’t matter what you do during the week. It matters what you do on game day. We know that, he knows that and we’ve got to improve.”
(There was a time when 50+ yard field goals were almost viewed as … but nowadays, is it more the expectation to trot your kicker out because he’ll be able to hit it?) – “Without question. If you look at the numbers around the league over the last year – they go up every year. It used to be a strength/question. Now the strength of kickers and being able to kick 56, 57 and 58 yarders is not part of it. Now the question and the equation is field position, how the game is going, are you playing to the offense, are you playing to the defense? Now those are the more situational questions.”
(That miss was a fourth-and-10. Should you guys have gotten running into the kicker? It looked like K Jason Sanders got leg-whipped.) – “Those are hard calls. Unless things are just blatant and exact timed up, that’s not a call that’s going to happen. The bottom line is if we get the call, let’s get the call; but let’s make the kick and then we have a choice.”
(I don’t know if you happened to see the Monday night game but it ended basically off a muffed punt where the returner had a teammate blocked into him. I was thinking about you when I saw the play and I was curious how you would coach to not get your own guy blocked into you. What’s the coaching point there? Then on the other side, do you coach guys to try to push those guys?) – “Question one, it’s hard. That’s where communication and awareness and recognition is so big for not only the returner but for the corner and for the safety. Then yes, as a gunner, you are not able to touch that guy on a fair catch. So if you have an opportunity to deposit the defender into his lap and he’s the one that makes contact, it is a legal play. But yes, everybody in the league should and does work that, as far as I know.”
(It looked like a little bit of that happened with S Jevon Holland.) – “Yeah, close. He thought where the ball was, he would be able to duck inside and then the ball cut and it ended up not playing that way. But again, that’s where communication and recognition are huge.”
(There was a national game where the kicker sort of kicked through an injury. I wondered if the punter would be the emergency kicker. Does P Thomas Morstead ever take any sort of emergency practice kicks?) – “We have guys that practice everything for an emergency.”
