These spread punt blocking rules apply to any defense and provide the most protection at the spot where the ball will be kicked. The basic principle for the linemen in carrying out their assignments is never to move the inside foot. If the lineman makes contact with the defensive man and throws him off-balance, then he can cover the kick immediately. The up-backs take a good stance with a wide base and uncoil at anyone coming through the inside gaps. The personal protector can use any type of block he wishes, but we prefer the butt block or the cross-body block when protecting the kicker.
Spread Punt Coverage
We want the first man down under the punt to dive at the safety man’s Adam’s apple, really “unloading” on him if possible. He may leave his feet if necessary in order to accomplish his objective. For illustrative purposes, [Figure 86], let’s assume that our center is the first man down under the punt. We want him to try to beat the football down the field, and tackle the safety man high when he touches it, or force the safety man to fair catch the football. We want our guards to go down and assume positions indicated in [Figure 86]. Our left end and right tackle will go down and set up five yards outside of the safety man, and five yards away from him. We set our right end out about 10 yards, and he is our “sprinter.” His assignment is to sprint straight for the safety man, and force the safety to fumble the ball, if possible. His line of direction has a second purpose, too. Since he is in an excellent position to catch the football should the punter fake the punt and pass, the defense must adjust to him and cannot merely permit him to run a diagonal course downfield every time we have a punting situation. If the defense continuously ignores him and doesn’t adjust to him when he covers punts, sooner or later we are going to hit him with the pass for a sizeable gain.
It is not possible for a coach to get the type of coverage on kicks, as illustrated in [Figure 86], unless he stresses the fact to his players that it is extremely important for them to spread out in order to maintain proper positions in “spreading the net” for the receiver. They must sprint at top speed in covering kicks. We do not want our left end and right tackle to make any tackles in our punt coverage, as they merely turn the runner into the other men. We want our six men to go down and get set in a football position three yards from the football and then guard the safety man. In assuming a good football position, we mean a position in which the player’s eyes are on the safety man, his tail is down, back straight, and his feet apart. If we have six men down on the safety man, guarding him, he will have no place to run. We want to drive the safety man back and forth, searching for a place to turn upfield, and then we’ll move in on him. We refer to this as our One-Six Formation. We want our up-backs to go downfield and take the positions of linebackers behind our six-man coverage, as illustrated in [Figure 86]. They must be in a position to defend against the return up the middle. We want our personal protector and punter to take halfback positions to the outside behind the one-six-two coverage formation ([Figure 86]).
Figure 86
We spend a great deal of time giving our players practice in executing their assignments on blocking and covering from spread punt formation. I can assure you that merely talking about their assignments and responsibilities will not obtain the desired results. I think we do a good job of covering punts simply because we work on this important phase of the kicking game so much.
As I mentioned previously, we do our kicking work last, not setting a definite time limit on it. When our players are covering punts, we blow a whistle and everyone stops. We want to find the players in their proper positions when covering the kick. If they are not covering to our satisfaction, we merely do it over and over again until we get the type of coverage we want. The boys actually put the pressure on each other to get perfect coverage, consequently we generally spend about 10 minutes instead of 20 minutes covering punts.