Bombers’ fake punt return was the real deal

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This article was published 11/09/2017 (2950 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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By now, most of us have heard how the Blue Bombers executed one of the most impressive punt returns in franchise history over the weekend, but questions remain: What made them think it would work, and why did it?

In case you missed it, at 7-7 in the second quarter, with fourteen minutes left in the half against the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the special teams of the local football club executed a fake punt return to perfection.

A return that, in all my years of watching and playing CFL football, I had never seen happen live before.

As greatly detailed by Free Press sports writer Mike Sawatzky after the game, we all know how it went down — Winnipeg’s Kevin Fogg sprinted across the field, pretending the ball was going to him, and the coverage unit followed him, enabling teammate Moe Leggett to return it from the other side of the field, virtually unabated, to the end zone.

Yet we don’t know why they thought it would work, and why it did.

Of course, I didn’t exactly play a lot of special teams in my decade and a half of football, but I talked to both a former all-star punter — Mike Renaud — and a former safety and punt coverage specialist — Shawn Gallant — to find out why almost all of the cover team were blindly decoyed by Fogg, and led away from where the ball was actually going.

It turns out when you’re punting from the left hash mark, you pretty much always try to place the ball to, or inside the numbers on the same side of the field. Punting diagonally, or completely across the field, where Fogg was pretending to be going to field the ball, is frowned upon and ill-advised. If you punt from one side of the field to the other, you give the returner both speed and space to return it, and it takes your coverage unit longer to get there. So why would most of the Saskatchewan cover team believe Fogg when mere seconds before their own punter told them exactly where he was planning on kicking it? Is it because kickers can’t be trusted, and have no control over their trajectories? Well, no, not exactly, but you’ll see what we mean.

So even though the punter most definitely told his cover team, when he was punting from the left hash, that the play was a Boundary left cover — Boundary meaning the short side of the field — once they started down field, that was about as long as they believed him for. For as Gallant told me, “if you’re trying to look up in the air at the ball, trying to see where it’s going, you’re gonna get ear-holed by someone on the return team.” So regardless of what this Saskatchewan coverage team had heard literally seconds before, they had to trust their eyes, and their eyes told them the Bombers were setting up a return from the other side of the field, and Fogg was making a mad dash across the field to secure the punt.

Even though it is exceedingly rare for a punter to call a left cover play and to then punt it right, the players had no landmarks, or reference points, other than the behaviour of both the returner and the return team, so they abandoned his direction, and went with what they knew. Wherever the returner is going — especially when there is only a single returner like the Bombers had deployed — the ball is surely going to meet them there.

On this spectacular play, not only did the punter call the coverage to where it made the most sense, he also kicked it almost perfectly, as it landed within a yard or two of the actual sideline. So why don’t other teams call this fake all the time? Because not only do you need a returner like Fogg, who can pull off and convince the masses he is genuinely attempting to field the punt, but you also need a player with the kind of speed and ability like Leggett, who can line up close to the line of scrimmage, beat everyone back to the depth of the football, and then turn around and take it to the house. Definitely a great play in Blue Bombers special teams history, and one we won’t soon forget.

Doug Brown, once a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears weekly in the Free Press.

Twitter: @DougBrown97