I had some time to kill this afternoon and was near a bookstore, so I wandered in and started reading a fascinating article about place kicking in a 'Best Sports Articles' sort of book. I found the entire article here, and it's completely worth the 10 or 15 minutes it takes to read. Anyway, this is the paragraph that really got me thinking about our punting unit:

In an office at the Colts' training facility, Vinatieri explained what he actually does for a living. (It isn't tackling: "Ideally, at the end of the year I have zero tackles," he said.) He marked the spot on the carpet, one inch by one inch, then took two deliberate steps back, then two to the side. In a game, he never takes his eyes off that spot. He doesn't watch the center, he said; he watches Hunter Smith, his holder. "His finger is on the spot. When his hand comes up, it's the key to move." The skill of the holder and the long snapper is one reason he chose to come to Indianapolis — as opposed to, say, joining Bill Parcells in Dallas. Dallas was having trouble with its kickers — Vinatieri suspected that this indicated problems with the process. Indianapolis, on the other hand, was a field-goal-kicking machine. "Look, Mike was making 88 percent of his kicks," Vinatieri said, referring to Vanderjagt. "He's a very good kicker. But he's not doing that if they have a crappy holder and snapper."

Wow, I thought - maybe Tomlin wasn't just making excuses when he cited continuity in holding as his reason to bring back Ernster, and then Berger again after less than completely stellar performances. A lot of us (myself included) wondered why MT wasn't trying out random people off the street. (most notably members of the CMU women's soccer team) Reading that quote clarified things for me quite a bit.

Moving on to talking about punting itself, here are the stats from this year:

Player             Punts  Yds     Net Yds Lng  Avg   Net Avg  IN 20
Mike Scifres   51        2,332  2,086     67    45.7  40.9        19
Mitch Berger  66        2,728  2,405     61    41.3  36.4        19

(I wish SBN had a table editor)

To be honest, I expected a bigger statistical difference between the two players - Berger's numbers tend to put him in the middle of the pack, and he's far from the worst punter in the league. Our return teams also limit the damage by allowing very little return yardage. (That includes Mr. Berger himself, remember that tackle to save the touchdown in the Ravens game? In retrospect, that was probably a game-saving tackle, as Baltimore got a FG on the ensuing drive instead of a TD, and we won by 4...) I don't like giving up 5 yards (on average) when we trade punts with SD, but it's not the 20 yards we were making it sound like, and our D should make the difference.

Just to clarify for our welcome guests from SD - I'm not saying that I wouldn't take Scifres in this game if we had the chance!

At any rate, I hope we don't punt once and this post turns out to be completely pointless. I'm pumped, this is going to be a great game this weekend!