Hester returned six kicks for touchdown last season. He is unique among NFL weapons (and we're not even going to talk about his 81-yard touchdown reception as a wide receiver last week). All of which means that The Great Sav Rocca Experiment will see its first memorable results written down on Sunday evening.
"He's great," said Rocca, the Eagles' first-year Australian punter. "He's very evasive. If you give him the ball and give him time, he'll get past a lot of guys. You can see by his stats, he's pretty much the best at the moment . . .
"We'll try a few things out in practice. We haven't set in stone what we're going to do for the weekend. We'll see how we go."
The operating theory is that while there is only so much you can do about kicking away from Hester on kickoffs, you have to go out of your way to try to keep the ball away from him on punts. A little less than half of the time, teams have been successful that way - which still leaves three or four punts per game that Hester brings back against 22 quaking knees.
"We've seen just about every type of game plan you can use," said Lovie Smith, the Bears coach.
"Teams have kicked to him. They've squibbed it. They've pooched it. We've seen just about everything, but I think it's hard to keep the ball away from a certain player."
Overall, teams have seemed to manage the kickoff part of the equation reasonably well. Yes, Hester has brought back one for a touchdown this season, but the Bears' overall kickoff return average is only 20 yards (30th in the league). Of 28 kickoff returns, Hester has taken 19 of them and nine others have gone to different players.
For people who say that it makes more sense just to kick the ball out of bounds and give it to the Bears on the 40-yard line after the penalty, that seems a bit much. Maybe if Hester is killing you on a given day, you kick it out of bounds - but not as a matter of course. Not yet, anyway.
