There is a story in one of the national magazines this week about a high school football coach in Arkansas who has decided that punting and placekicking are just things he's not that into any longer.
If you look around every season, you can find something like this, some strange twist on the old way of playing football, some team out in the boonies that puts in lefthanded players for plays to the left, or snaps the ball sideways, or has finally perfected the hidden-ball trick.
It gets boring as you stand around monitoring fourth-period gym class and the mind tends to wander. You come up with things.
Kevin Kelley, the football coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, hasn't punted since 2007. He doesn't much like to try field goals, either.
"The average punt in high school nets you 30 yards, but we convert around half our fourth downs, so it doesn't make sense to give up the ball," Kelley told Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated. "Besides, if your offense knows it has four downs instead of three, it totally changes the game. I don't believe in punting and really can't ever see doing it again."
I don't know if Andy Reid subscribes to SI, or if he has time for idle reading during the football season, but if he does, look out, Sav Rocca. This is, after all, the season of copycat innovation for Reid, who has become infatuated with the Wildcat offensive wrinkle, apparently to the extent that he added a convicted felon to the roster just to make the playbook even more fascinating.
The Wildcat and its various offshoots came along for essentially the same reason that Kelley decided not to have a punter on his roster. If Pulaski Academy had a punter who could consistently net 50 yards, Kelley would punt. If there were a placekicker on the roster who was reliable on field-goal attempts of up to 40 yards or so, he'd try some field goals. That's not the case, however, and the odds tell Kelley he's better off going for it on fourth down.
In the same way, the option packages and direct-snap wrinkles came along because teams didn't have good passing quarterbacks. The Wildcat may eventually become a forgotten orphan - at least at the pro level - but right now it has a clamoring mob of fathers.
Some believe it developed (from murky mists of the single-wing and wing-T formations) at West Genesee High School in New York state, where Steve Bush, now an assistant with the Miami Dolphins, coached the Wildcats.
