Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

The Seahawks just dropkicked a kickoff. Never seen that before!

Wendell02 wrote:The Seahawks just dropkicked a kickoff. Never seen that before!

The broadcasters said it had probably never happened before...but, of course, it happened quite often in the 1920s and 1930s.

Is there a clip? Who was the kicker?

It was their punter, Michael Dickson...

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-game-high ... le-kickoff

ESPN needed to dropkick that halftime show they gave us, too.

He was kicking on a short field, so the dropkick might have made the most sense if they were trying to force a return.

ChrisBabcock wrote:It was their punter, Michael Dickson...

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-game-high ... le-kickoff

For what it's worth Dickson may be very special as a Punter, I know it's not sexy but with Hecker and Dickson in the league at the same time this may be the golden era of Punting. It's likely the logical evolution of specializatio and the salary cap.

We went from Punting being a part time job to a full time one 50 years ago, but you didn't have special teams coaches until the 70's and now high schoolers can go to Kicking camps, amazing.

The salary cap as well has an interesting impact, you can only pay so much for the best players but can pay as much for coaches as you like, and more to the point hire as many as you'd like. There's a theoretical world where every ayer has an individual coach. If a deep pocketed. Owner wants to pay to win he cannot circumvent the cap but could hire a Right Tackle coach if he wanted. It's all a little crazy but I think the amount of incremental performance we're seeing these days isn't necessarily better athlete's but more coaching, equipment, training, diet, etc.

NWebster wrote:

ChrisBabcock wrote:It was their punter, Michael Dickson...

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-game-high ... le-kickoff

For what it's worth Dickson may be very special as a Punter, I know it's not sexy but with Hecker and Dickson in the league at the same time this may be the golden era of Punting. It's likely the logical evolution of specializatio and the salary cap.

We went from Punting being a part time job to a full time one 50 years ago, but you didn't have special teams coaches until the 70's and now high schoolers can go to Kicking camps, amazing.

The salary cap as well has an interesting impact, you can only pay so much for the best players but can pay as much for coaches as you like, and more to the point hire as many as you'd like. There's a theoretical world where every ayer has an individual coach. If a deep pocketed. Owner wants to pay to win he cannot circumvent the cap but could hire a Right Tackle coach if he wanted. It's all a little crazy but I think the amount of incremental performance we're seeing these days isn't necessarily better athlete's but more coaching, equipment, training, diet, etc.

This may be the golden era of punting. I agree the job has become highly specialized over the past 20 years or so, and it became apparent in the Lechler thread from the HOVG section when John Turney put up a list of the top 25 highest net punting averages of all time and every one of them started their careers in the 21st century. Now that we have play by play for every punt for the 21st century, it is a simple matter to go thru the game books and figure out where the guy punted from, how far it traveled, where it landed, and what happened after if anything. And there is a lot of play by play available that covers the entire careers of many of the great punters, including Ray Guy.

Dickson is from Australia and played Australian Rules Football, which features punt-like kicking. I've often wondered why there aren't more Aussie punters in American football, because there are guys down there who can kick goals from 70 meters away, which is nearly 80 yards. The only other that I know of is Mat McBriar, who punted for several NFL teams not too long ago.

Current NFL punter Lachlan Edwards is another Australian. Former NFL punter Darren Bennett was also from Australia.