There was a lot of long snapper discourse during the preseason, mainly centered around the Green Bay Packers’ incumbent Matt Orzech and the challenger Cal Adomitis. This all stemmed from the fact that rookie kicker Trey Smack did not miss a kick in the preseason with Adomitis as his holder. I – a denizen of the internet – saw calls for Orzech to be released. I saw multiple people saying that Orzech was bad, and it led me to a very important question? Is Orzech bad as a long snapper on field goals
and extra points? I found I did not know, so I tried to find out.
That’s a long intro, but that search led us all here, to a column where we look at the location of snaps on field goals and extra points. Congrats to you, a massive weirdo, who has decided that you are also interested in this.
I watched some videos and dug through some books about this and came up with a quadrant. I sketched something up, and I will share that with you now.
If you can’t tell, that’s a stick figure in a position of holding for a field goal. I spent entirely too much time on it. I tried to color code the best I could to indicate the good and the bad. The best place for a snap is off the ground, over the place where the snap is to be held. The next best place is off the ground on the body. The ground at the snap point or at the body is worse than those, but still kind of in the green because it gives the holder a chance to get the ball in the vicinity of where the ball is to be placed, but being on the ground is less than ideal.
The worst are the areas where the holder has to move his body and put himself off balance. The two zones behind him are bad, and the head/above the head is a disaster area. You don’t want that one.
There’s a whole rotation of the ball element to make sure the holder can catch it and easily place it with laces out, but that’s simply a level we’re not tracking here (yet). I will say that all of Orzech’s snaps we’re looking at today were good on that front. Good rotation.
With that in mind, how did Orzech do in Week 1?
As you can see from my very official numbers, he did well! I looked at all 6 of the field goal/extra point attempts, including the one they ended up wiping off the board with the defensive offsides. All 6 attempts were snapped squarely in the green zone, with 4 of those 6 (66.7%) in the ideal quadrant.
There is the matter of the missed extra point. Where did that one hit?
That’s the ideal quadrant, right there. Snapped up, above the place where the ball is going to be placed for the hold.
For the hold itself, we talked about that a bit in a preseason post. In a situation with no wind, most kickers tend to like the ball held with a slight forward lean, away from the kicker.
Looks good on both fronts. I am not an expert in kicking mechanics, so the miss itself is beyond me. What I can say is that the snap-to-hold operations looked good.
I have no idea what form this column will take going forward. Will I abandon it because there is limited interest? Maybe! The goal now is to keep writing it weekly, provided it’s something you all actually find some value in. Sound off in the comments, I guess. I’ll be tracking in regardless; how much digital ink I spill on it will likely be up to you.
Albums listened to: Nine Inch Nails – With Teeth
