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One thing I noticed last weekend against Wisconsin that drove me nuts was our short kickoffs again. Time and time again, Wisconsin started in great field position because of our short kickoffs. This is the last thing we need to be doing, especially considering our defense isn’t exactly playing lights out. We’re basically giving teams a shortened field every possession.

Against Wisconsin, their kicker was booting the ball into the end zone for touchbacks to put us on the 20 to start our drives, or even further back when we tried to return most of the kicks and got stuffed. We continually gave them great starting field position which always seemed to be around the 35 or so. Our short kickoffs gave them a shortened field, about a third of the field advantage, and they even had some big returns like that 85 yard return to boot. This proved to hurt us against Wisconsin and will against good teams down the road. Against Wisconsin, we couldn’t stop their offense as it was, but we gave them great field position which is the last thing they needed from us. If I’m not mistaken, I believe our pooch kickoffs are planned, but I’ve got to ask - why? I mean, if we’re going to keep giving them a short field, then just kickoff out of bounds and eliminated the chance of any type of return and I’ll stop scratching my head as to why we are back to doing them.

I remember this being the case the last couple years and it hurt us many times before, when Suisham would pooch the kickoffs or he’d kick them out of bounds and our opponents would get the ball in great position. We finally seemed to get that corrected down the stretch last season. But this year, I have to ask, can our kickers not kick touchbacks? Because if that’s the case, I highly suggest we look for someone that can. Heck, I bet we have a player or two on the soccer team that could walk-on and kick touchbacks. These short fields are going to hurt us again down the road. I don’t want to see teams like Boise State, Miami and Toledo starting at our 35-40 yards line. I’m not a special teams coach, but I see this as a problem we need to work out.

I don't know what to think about our kicking game. I have been completely underwhelmed by Brandon's response (at least publicly) to our trouble spots from the Wisky game - namely special teams and defense. He basically said a couple of times this summer, also, that he wasn't worried about our kicking game (bearing in mind that he was talking about field goals, not necessarily kickoffs) because, essentially, we wouldn't need it.

I'm really kind of in limbo with Brandon right now. I'd have a great deal of respect for him if he would go out and look for walkon kicker, but I'm afraid he has far too much of a "aw, shucks" attitude to do that.

All I am saying is that no matter how good our offense is, this is the last year I'm going to sit back with a "wait and see" attitude with coach...

the one time we did kick long, wisky had the long return and turned the game around on us. their 35 is better than our 5.

the short kick is in response to our weak coverage teams. suisham could kick touchbacks on occasion, but i'm not convinced anyone on this current team could kick a touchback if he had a 30 mph wind behind him.

Finding somebody to kick touchbacks is not exactly easy. They're just not that common...I'd be more inclined to actually fix our coverage teams so we could cover a standard kick return.

It's funny because I think it was the one long kickoff we had that really hurt us last week. We were up 20-7 and kicking off when instead of kicking shore like we had been, we get a long one off to the goal line which was returned inside our 10. Wisky scored 2 plays later and got the momentum back. If we could have held them to 2 scores behind us we could have maybe forced them out of their running game...maybe. It's hard to run the ball every play when you're down 2 scores. I would much rather have a big guy catch it at the 25 or 30 instead of one of the other teams' burners getting with the chance of returning it the distance.

Did you realize that the 2 players in the back killed our special teams. #1 was a back up running back and burned our d-fense when Calhoun was resting. I think it was a smart idea to kick the ball short because the score for Wisconsin would be a lot higher than it ended up.