Special Teams Positions: Every Role on Kicks and Punts

The first play of Super Bowl XLI, on February 4, 2007, was a kickoff. Devin Hester of the Chicago Bears caught it at his own 8-yard line and ran 92 yards for a touchdown. Fourteen seconds had gone, and neither team's offense or defense had set foot on the field.

That play belonged to special teams, the third unit of a football team, which handles every kicking play: kickoffs, punts, field goals and extra points. An NFL club has six of these units. Three do the kicking (kickoff, punt, and the field goal and extra point team) and three line up against the other side's kicks (kickoff return, punt return and field goal block). Each puts eleven players on the field. Only three of those players are full-time specialists, the kicker, the punter and the long snapper. The rest are backups from the offense and defense doing a second job, in roles with their own names: gunner, jammer, personal protector, holder, wing, returner. The NFL rulebook is organized around free kicks and scrimmage kicks rather than units, and the positions below are the ones coaches have built on top of those rules.

What special teams are: six units and the roles on each

Unit	When it takes the field	Named roles
Kickoff	To start each half and after every score	Kicker, coverage players, contain men
Kickoff return	When the opponent kicks off	Returners, front-line blockers
Punt	Usually on fourth down	Punter, long snapper, personal protector, gunners, guards, tackles, wings
Punt return	When the opponent punts	Returner, jammers, rushers, hold-up men
Field goal and extra point	For a scoring kick	Kicker, holder, long snapper, guards, tackles, ends, wings
Field goal block	When the opponent tries one	Edge rushers, interior push, jumpers, a deep safety

• 6Kicking units
• 11Players on the field for each
• 3Full-time specialists on a roster
• 4Core coverage and return units

Counts of units and roles as coaches usually group them. The rulebooks define the kicks, not the units, so some staffs count the hands team or the extra point team separately.

A typical game has somewhere between two and three dozen kicking plays. They are a minority of the snaps and they move the ball farther than any others: a punt changes field position by roughly 40 yards in a single play, and no call an offensive coordinator makes does that reliably.

Two things set these units apart from the offense and defense. The first is who plays on them. A starting quarterback or left tackle is too valuable to send running 50 yards downfield into a collision, so the coverage and return units are filled from the bottom half of the roster. The second is how seldom each unit plays. A punt team might take the field five times in a game, and each of those five snaps has to be clean. Special teams practice is therefore mostly about eliminating the single disastrous play, the block, the bad snap, the missed lane, because one of those is often worth as much as a sustained drive.

College football uses the same six units and nearly the same names. Where the NCAA rule book makes a role work differently, most of all on punts and kickoffs, this page says so.

The three specialists: kicker, punter and long snapper

Every other player on a 53-man roster has a position on offense or defense. These three do not.

The kicker, or placekicker, attempts field goals and extra points and on most teams handles kickoffs as well. He is the only player whose work is recorded entirely as makes and misses.

The punter kicks the ball away on fourth down. On nearly every NFL team he is also the holder for field goals and extra points, a pairing that exists because he and the kicker and the snapper spend practice together on a separate field and can rehearse the hold hundreds of times a week. Some punters take the kickoffs when the kicker's leg is being rested.

The long snapper delivers the ball to the punter, 15 yards behind him, and to the holder, seven or eight yards behind him. Then he blocks. On a punt he is also expected to run downfield and help with the tackle. The craft and how teams came to give it a roster spot are covered in our guide to what a long snapper does.

Under NFL numbering rules kickers and punters wear 0 through 19, the same range as quarterbacks. Long snappers are numbered as the linemen or linebackers they nominally are.

How the specialist arrived

For the first half of the league's history there were none. The kicker was a player with a strong leg who also had a real position. Lou Groza kicked for Cleveland and started at offensive tackle. George Blanda kicked and played quarterback. They approached the ball straight on and struck it with the toe.

Pete Gogolak changed the job in 1964, when he joined the Buffalo Bills and kicked soccer-style, approaching from an angle and striking the ball with his instep. He was more accurate from distance than the toe kickers and he played nowhere else. Within about two decades the straight-on kicker was gone and every team had a specialist. The dedicated long snapper came last, once coaches decided that one bad snap a season cost more than the roster spot.

What happens when one is hurt

NFL rosters almost never carry a backup kicker. If the kicker is injured during a game the punter usually takes over, and if the punter is hurt the kicker punts. An emergency long snapper, typically a tight end or a linebacker who has practiced it, is named before every game. Teams that lose a specialist in the first quarter often stop attempting long field goals altogether and go for it on fourth down instead, which shows how narrow the skill is.

Kicker vs punter: a placekick against a ball dropped from the hands

Both men kick a football for a living. Their jobs share very little else.

Question	Kicker	Punter
How the ball is presented	On a tee for kickoffs; held on the ground for field goals	Dropped from his own hands
When he plays	Kickoffs, field goals, extra points	Fourth down
What he is aiming for	The space between the uprights, or a landing spot on a kickoff	Distance, hang time and a spot near a sideline or the goal line
Where he stands	Seven or eight yards behind the line on a field goal	About 15 yards behind the line
Can the kick score points	Yes	No
The swing	Across the ball from an angle, with the instep	Straight through, with the leg finishing high

A placekick is a strike at a stationary ball. The kicker takes the same steps every time, plants his off foot beside the ball and swings across his body. The variables are the snap, the hold and the wind. On kickoffs the ball sits on a tee one inch high. On field goals and extra points in the NFL and in college there is no tee; the holder sets the ball on the grass. High school rules allow a kicking block, which is one reason a college freshman's range can shrink at first.

A punt adds a moving part. The punter catches the snap, takes two or three steps, and drops the ball so that it meets his foot at the right height and angle. Coaches say the drop is the punt: a ball that tilts or drifts an inch comes off the foot wrong, and there is no holder to blame.

The rulebook draws one more line between them. A punt can never score. A placekick can, and so can the third kind of kick the rules recognize, the drop kick, in which the ball is dropped and struck as it bounces. Doug Flutie made one for an extra point for New England on January 1, 2006, the first successful drop kick in the league since 1941.

Why almost nobody does both

The two swings use the leg differently, and a specialist who practices one all week has little reason to risk his mechanics or his hamstring on the other. There is also the holding problem: on most teams the punter is the holder, and he cannot hold for himself.

In college and high school it is common for one player to punt and placekick, because rosters have fewer true specialists. In the NFL a player handling both is nearly always covering for an injury.

The field goal unit: the holder, the wings and 1.3 seconds

Nine blockers, a holder and a kicker. The formation never varies much, because there is one way to do the job and little time to do it in.

1. 1SetThe holder kneels seven or eight yards behind the snapper and marks the spot. The kicker measures his steps back and to the side.
2. 2SnapThe long snapper fires the ball to the holder's hands, spun so that the laces arrive facing forward.
3. 3Catch and spotThe holder catches it and sets the tip on the turf with one finger on top.
4. 4LacesIf the laces are facing the kicker, the holder spins the ball so they point at the goal posts.
5. 5KickThe kicker, already moving as the ball arrives, plants and swings through.
6. 6ProtectThe nine blockers hold their inside gaps until they hear the ball struck.

The standard sequence. Coaches time the whole operation at about 1.3 seconds as a working benchmark; it is not a rule.

The holder

His job looks trivial and is not. He has to catch a hard snap cleanly, place the ball on the exact spot the kicker is aiming his steps at, set its lean, and turn the laces away from the kicker's foot, all in well under a second and without looking up. Laces facing the kicker make the ball fly unpredictably. A hold an inch off the spot changes where the foot meets the ball.

Backup quarterbacks used to do it, on the theory that they had the best hands. Punters do it now, on the theory that practice time matters more. The holder is also the passer or runner on a fake.

The wall and the wings

The seven men on the line, the snapper, two guards, two tackles and two ends, stand almost foot to foot and block the gap to their inside. They do not fire out. They take one step, get big, and let the rushers run into them. Starting offensive linemen often fill these spots, one of the few special teams jobs given to starters.

The two wings stand just behind the ends, turned outward at an angle. Each has the widest rusher on his side. A wing cannot stop a defender who has a running start, so he does not try. He pushes him wide, making him run an arc around the hold. The arc takes longer than 1.3 seconds if everyone inside has done his job.

Counting the distance

A field goal's length is the line of scrimmage plus 17 or 18 yards: ten for the depth of the end zone and seven or eight for the hold. A snap from the 25-yard line is a 42- or 43-yard attempt. Since 2015 the NFL has snapped extra points from the 15, which makes them 33-yard kicks. College extra points are snapped from the 3.

The target is 18 feet 6 inches wide, above a crossbar 10 feet off the ground.

A miss is a live ball until it is dead. If it falls short in the field of play the defense may return it, as Hester did for 108 yards against the Giants in 2006, so the linemen who were blocking a second ago have to cover. When an NFL kick misses and is not returned, the other team takes over at the spot of the kick, not the line of scrimmage, or at its own 20 if the kick was tried from closer than that, a rule that adds those seven or eight yards to the cost of a long miss.

The punt team: gunners, the personal protector and hang time

Fourth down, 15 yards of space, and about two seconds.

36%18%18%9%9%9%

• Guards and tackles4
• Gunners2
• Wings2
• Long snapper1
• Personal protector1
• Punter1

The standard professional formation. College teams often use a three-man shield in front of the punter instead of a single personal protector.

Show the numbers

The eleven players on an NFL punt team

Item	Value
Guards and tackles	4
Gunners	2
Wings	2
Long snapper	1
Personal protector	1
Punter	1

Gunners

The two gunners split out wide, near the sidelines, like wide receivers. At the snap they run. Their assignment is to reach the returner as the ball does and either tackle him or leave him no choice except a fair catch.

They matter more in the NFL than anywhere else because of one rule. On a punt in the professional game, only the players lined up on the ends of the line may go downfield before the ball is kicked. The other members of the punt team have to wait for the sound of the foot. So for the first second and a half of the play the gunners are the entire coverage. A team with one great gunner can take away half the field.

College football has no such restriction, and all eleven may release at the snap. That is why college punt formations look different, with linemen spread wide and a three-man shield of big bodies standing in front of the punter.

The interior and the wings

The snapper, two guards and two tackles protect first and cover second. Each blocks the rusher in his gap for a count, then releases into a lane and runs downfield in a spread net behind the gunners. The wings line up just off the line outside the tackles and take the edge rushers.

The personal protector

He stands about five yards behind the line, between the snapper and the punter, and he runs the unit. Before the snap he counts the rushers, identifies where an overload is coming from and calls the protection. After it he blocks whoever comes free up the middle. On a fake he is frequently the one who takes a short direct snap and runs. Teams give the job to a safety or a linebacker they trust to think.

Hang time against distance

A punter is graded on three things. Distance is the obvious one. Hang time is how long the ball stays in the air, and 4.5 seconds or better is the usual benchmark for a good one. The third is direction.

Distance and hang time pull against each other. A long, low punt outruns the coverage and hands the returner the ball with 15 yards of open field in front of him; that is "outkicking the coverage." A shorter punt that hangs gives the gunners time to arrive, and usually ends in a fair catch. The number that reflects this is net average: the punt's distance minus the return, with 20 yards subtracted for a touchback.

Near midfield the job changes. The punter is no longer trying to kick far. He is trying to drop the ball inside the 10-yard line, either by angling it out of bounds or by hitting a high, end-over-end kick that checks up when it lands so a teammate can down it before it reaches the end zone.

The punt return team: the returner, the jammers and three choices

The returner stands alone 40 or 50 yards downfield and makes the most exposed decision in the sport.

1. 1Read the puntHe judges the depth and the hang time and glances at how close the first coverage player is.
2. 2Return itWith room in front of him, he catches the ball and runs behind blockers who have held up the gunners.
3. 3Fair catchWith coverage on top of him, he waves one arm over his head. He may catch the ball untouched, and it is dead where he does.
4. 4Let it goIf the ball is coming down inside about his own 10, he moves away and lets it bounce, hoping it rolls into the end zone for a touchback to the 20.
5. 5Warn the blockersOn a ball he is leaving, he shouts a code word so that teammates stay clear of a bounce that could hit them.

A general description of the returner's options. The yard line at which a returner is told to let the ball go is a coaching rule of thumb and differs by team.

The fair catch is his protection, and the conditions on it are strict: the signal has to be clear, and once he gives it he cannot advance the ball. The details are in our guide to the fair catch rule. The warning call matters because of what happens when a punt touches a member of the receiving team. It becomes a ball either side can recover, the situation described in our guide to the muffed punt. A punt touched first by the kicking team can be taken by the receivers at the spot of that touch.

Jammers

The defenders lined up across from the gunners are jammers. Their job is to keep the gunner from getting downfield cleanly, by getting hands on him at the line and then running with him and steering him toward the sideline. When the return team puts two jammers on one gunner the pair is called a vise. Doubling both gunners uses four players and leaves fewer to rush the punter, and that trade tells the punt team what is coming.

Return or rush

The other eight players have one of two plans. On a return, most of them drop back after a brief hold-up at the line and set up a wall or a lane to one side of the field. On a rush, eight or more go after the punter and the returner is left to fair catch whatever comes down. Coaches choose between them by situation. A punter backed up against his own end zone, with less room behind him, draws the rush.

The returner is seldom a full-time specialist. He is usually a receiver, a cornerback or a running back who also catches punts, chosen first for whether he will catch it every time and second for what he does afterward. A fumbled punt at the 15-yard line costs more than a great return gains, so judgment beats speed.

Kickoff coverage and kickoff return

No play in football has been rewritten as often. The version the NFL adopted in 2024 and has adjusted each year since changed what every role on it does.

The kicker still kicks from his own 35-yard line. He is alone there. In the alignment as first written in 2024, his ten teammates line up 25 yards downfield with a foot on the receiving team's 40. Nine members of the return team stand five to ten yards away in a setup zone between their own 30 and 35, and up to two returners wait in a landing zone that runs from the goal line to the 20. Nobody except the kicker and the returners may move until the ball hits the ground or is touched in the landing zone or the end zone. There is no fair catch. Where the ball is spotted after each kind of touchback, and how the alignment counts have been changed season by season, is set out in our explainer on the NFL's kickoff rule changes.

Coverage

The ten coverage players are numbered from the outside in, usually five on each side of the kicker. Each has a lane, a strip of field he is responsible for, and the first rule is to stay in it: a player who leaves his lane to chase the ball opens a seam for the returner.

The outermost man on each side is a contain player. His job is the same as a force defender's on a sweep. He keeps the returner from getting to the sideline and turns him back toward the other nine. The kicker is the safety, the last tackler, and a kicker's tackle usually means something has already gone wrong.

Under the old running-start kickoff the coverage team prized speed above all, since the first man downfield could reach the returner before the blocks were set. With both lines now starting five yards apart and standing still, the play resembles a run from scrimmage, and teams have shifted toward players who can shed a block.

Return

The two returners decide between them who takes the ball; the other becomes the lead blocker. The nine in the setup zone pair off against the coverage players and try to create a crease, often with a double team at the point of attack. Blocking wedges of three or more men were banned in 2009 and two-man wedges in 2018, both for safety reasons.

College football still uses the traditional kickoff from the 35, with the coverage team running from behind the ball, and lets a returner fair catch a kick inside his own 25 for a touchback to the 25.

The hands team: who goes out for an onside kick

When the kicking team needs the ball back, it tries an onside kick, a short kick it hopes to recover itself. The kick has to travel 10 yards, or be touched first by the receiving team, before the kickers may legally grab it.

The receiving team answers by changing its personnel. Off go the blockers. On come the players least likely to drop a football: wide receivers, tight ends, running backs, cornerbacks and safeties. This is the hands team.

They line up in tiers. The front row stands closest to the kick, and it is split into two kinds of player with different instructions. Some are designated to catch the ball or fall on it. Others are told not to touch it at all and to block the nearest opponents so the catchers have room. Behind them is a second row for a ball that is kicked harder or bounces high, and one man stays deep in case the kick is not an onside kick at all.

The assignments are the whole play. In the NFC Championship Game of January 2015, Green Bay led Seattle late in the fourth quarter and needed only to recover an onside kick. A Packers player whose job was to block went up for the ball, it came off his hands, and Seattle recovered and went on to win in overtime. The catcher behind him was in position.

The declared kick

In the NFL an onside kick can no longer be a surprise. Since 2024 the kicking team has had to tell the officials one is coming, after which both sides set up in a conventional onside formation and not the standing alignment used for ordinary kickoffs. The surprise onside kick, such as the one New Orleans recovered to open the second half of Super Bowl XLIV, is gone from the professional game. The conditions on when a team may declare have been loosened since, and the current terms are in our guide to onside kick rules.

Because everyone knows what is coming, recoveries by the kicking team are uncommon. The hands team is still sent out every time, since the one occasion it is not ready is the one that loses a game.

The block teams: edge rushers, interior jumpers and the rules against leaping and leverage

A blocked kick is the rarest big play on special teams, and whole units are designed to produce one.

Blocking a field goal

There are two ways to get there. From the edge, a fast rusher lines up outside the wing and runs the arc, trying to lay out in front of the ball before it rises. From the middle, the biggest defensive linemen drive the blockers backward so that the kick has to clear them at close range, and the tallest player on the unit, the jumper, stands behind that push and leaps with his hands up as the kicker swings. Low kicks are blocked in the middle. Slow operations are blocked from the edge.

One defender stays deep as a safety in case of a fake or a short kick he can return.

Blocking a punt

Punt blocks come from numbers or from speed. The rushing team overloads one side so that the protection has more rushers than blockers there, or sends its quickest man off the edge against a wing. Rushers are taught to aim for a spot a couple of yards in front of the punter, where the ball will leave his foot, and never at the punter himself. A blocked punt that stays behind the line of scrimmage is a live ball.

Missing is expensive.

Foul	Yards	Automatic first down
Roughing the kicker	15	Yes
Running into the kicker	5	No
Leaping over the line on a field goal or extra point	15	Yes
Using a teammate or opponent for leverage to block a kick	15	Yes

A rusher who touches the ball is excused contact with the kicker that follows from the block. One who misses and hits the plant leg has given the offense a new set of downs, a distinction explained in our guide to roughing and running into the kicker.

Leaping and leverage

For a few seasons in the mid-2010s the most spectacular block attempt was a linebacker timing the snap and hurdling the long snapper. The NFL banned it in 2017 on safety grounds: a defender may not run forward and leap over the line on a field goal or extra point. College football has a similar prohibition.

Leverage is the older rule. A defender may not jump or stand on a teammate or an opponent to gain height, and may not be lifted or pushed upward by a teammate. The league has added limits on the formation as well. The defense may not have more than six players on the line on either side of the snapper, and may not push its own linemen from behind into the blockers. The snapper, head down at the moment he snaps, has protections of his own in the rulebook on how and when rushers may contact him.

Who plays special teams: the core four and how a roster spot is won

Coaches call kickoff, kickoff return, punt and punt return the core four. A reserve who plays on all of them is a four-phase player, and that phrase decides more roster spots than any other.

The arithmetic is simple. A team dresses fewer than 50 players for a game. Twenty-two start on offense and defense and three are specialists. Most of the others need a reason to be in uniform beyond being the backup at one position, since a backup may not play a snap. Covering kicks is that reason.

The work suits certain bodies. Coverage units want players who can run 40 yards, shed a block and tackle in space, and that describes linebackers, safeties, and the bigger running backs and receivers. So the fourth and fifth linebackers, the third and fourth safeties, the backup tight end and the last receiver on the depth chart form the heart of every coverage team. Offensive and defensive linemen play on the field goal units and almost nowhere else.

How a job is won

For a late-round draft pick or an undrafted rookie, training camp is an audition for these units. He is unlikely to beat a veteran for a starting job in August. He can be the first man downfield on a punt in a preseason game, and the special teams coach will bring the film to the meeting where the last roster spots are decided. What those summer games are used for is laid out in our explainer on the NFL preseason, and the size and shape of the roster he is trying to make is in our guide to the 53-man roster.

The reverse is also true. A veteran backup who stops being useful on special teams becomes expensive to keep, because the roster spot now buys only insurance.

Starters are held out of the core four on most teams to limit their exposure to open-field collisions. The exceptions are returners, who are sometimes the offense's most dangerous players, and the occasional star who covers kicks because he is the best on the team at it.

The special teams coordinator and hidden yardage

In 1969 George Allen, then coaching the Los Angeles Rams, hired a young assistant named Dick Vermeil to coach nothing except the kicking game. Vermeil is generally credited as the league's first full-time special teams coach, and Marv Levy took a similar job with Philadelphia the same year. Both are in the Hall of Fame as head coaches. Until then the kicking units had been handled by whichever position coach had a spare half hour.

The modern coordinator has an odd job. He coaches more players than anyone except the head coach, since nearly every non-starter passes through his meeting room, and he gets the least practice time. He builds six units from other coaches' backups and rebuilds them every week as injuries move those backups into starting roles.

What he produces is field position.

Hidden yardage

The phrase describes yards that are in no offensive or defensive total and decide where drives start. Suppose two teams punt five times each in a game. One nets 44 yards a punt and the other 38. That is 30 yards of difference, about the length of three first downs, and it will not appear on either side of the conventional box score.

The same is true of where a kickoff return ends, of a punt downed at the 4 rather than rolling in for a touchback, and of a penalty on a return that moves a drive's starting point back ten yards. An offense that begins at its own 35 needs far less to reach field goal range than one that begins at its own 15. Over a season those differences add up to points, and the modern way of counting them is described in our explainer on fourth-down analytics, since the value of a punt is half of every fourth-down decision.

A route to the top job

Because the special teams coach deals with the whole roster and with game situations, the job has produced head coaches. John Harbaugh ran Philadelphia's special teams for nine seasons before Baltimore hired him as head coach in 2008, and he won Super Bowl XLVII there. Bill Belichick's first position responsibilities in the league, in the 1970s, were on special teams. It remains a less common path than the offensive or defensive coordinator's chair, and in our judgment an undervalued one.

Special teams aces: Steve Tasker, Devin Hester and how the honors have treated them

Steve Tasker was 5-foot-9, a ninth-round draft pick from Northwestern, and nominally a wide receiver. Buffalo claimed him off waivers from Houston in 1986 and for the next 12 seasons he was the best gunner in football. He was selected to seven Pro Bowls for covering kicks and was the most valuable player of the Pro Bowl that followed the 1992 season. The Bills went to four straight Super Bowls with him on every coverage unit.

Player	Role	How the honors treated him
Steve Tasker	Gunner, Buffalo Bills	Seven Pro Bowls; not in the Hall of Fame through the class of 2025
Devin Hester	Returner, Chicago Bears	Hall of Fame, 2024, the first elected primarily as a returner
Ray Guy	Punter, Raiders	Hall of Fame, 2014, the first pure punter
Jan Stenerud	Kicker, Kansas City Chiefs and others	Hall of Fame, 1991, the first pure placekicker
Mark Moseley	Kicker, Washington	The league's Most Valuable Player for 1982
Desmond Howard	Returner, Green Bay Packers	Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXXI
Matthew Slater	Coverage, New England Patriots	Ten Pro Bowls as a special teamer

Tasker's case is the test of how the sport values the job. He has been a Hall of Fame candidate for many years and, through the class of 2025, had not been elected. The argument against him is snap count: a gunner plays perhaps a dozen snaps a game. The argument for him is that he was plainly the best ever at a role every team fields. The list of inductees changes each February, so his status may have moved since.

Devin Hester broke through first. He returned six kicks for touchdowns as a rookie in 2006, and his 14 punt-return touchdowns and 20 return touchdowns of all kinds were both NFL records through the 2025 season. Teams took to punting out of bounds and kicking off short to keep the ball from him, conceding field position on every kick, which is the returner's equivalent of a quarterback refusing to throw at a cornerback. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2024.

Kickers and punters waited almost as long. Jan Stenerud went in in 1991 and Morten Andersen in 2017. Ray Guy, the first punter ever drafted in the first round, in 1973, was not inducted until 2014, more than a quarter-century after he retired.

The individual awards tell the same story from the other side. Mark Moseley's 1982 Most Valuable Player award, in a strike-shortened season, is the only one a special teams player has won. Desmond Howard, who returned a kickoff 99 yards for a touchdown against New England, is the only one to be named the most valuable player of a Super Bowl. Matthew Slater's ten Pro Bowl selections as a coverage player passed Tasker's seven and went largely unremarked outside New England.

The honors lag the influence. A third of the game's phases belong to these units, and the players in them are judged mostly by the absence of disasters. The other positions on the field are collected in our American football section.