The return team would have one guy on the gun or the split, and one guy returns, so you got nine guys rushing against essentially the punter who wasn’t a blocker or the split guy who wasn’t a blocker and the snapper who really wasn’t a blocker, so it was nine on eight, and the idea was to block the most dangerous eight and let the ninth guy go and punt away from him, and then when the Cowboys went to spread punt and then the Cardinals followed that pretty quickly, and they kept two gunners split, and the snapper blocked a guy, then that created an eight on eight situation but put a lot of pressure on the snapper to deliver the ball 15 yards deep on the money and still block a good rusher offsetting and the A-gap. First of all, there wasn’t that many gunners, but when teams started using gunners, they would pull one in and kick away from the free guy on the back side, and that was kind of the idea that protection was not to let the snapper block against a nine-man rush with a split player.

Prior to that, teams would generally pull. I think long snapping, to me, changed in the mid-80s, and really the key guy in that was DeOssie, in my opinion because Steve was the first center that really, truly allowed a spread punt formation against all-out rush. First of all, there were no long snappers, but the specialists, the kickers and the punters were frequently position players, and that’s where they came from in college as well, so a lot of the good college punters and place kickers also played a position, and then as time evolved, starting with like Gogolak and guys like that, you know, they specialized in kicking, and then you had some of the punters that specialized in punting, so players like Danny White and Tom Tupa and guys like that who were very good position players, you know, Gino Cappelletti, that evolved into specialists because of, I would say, the importance of the kicking game the number of plays that the kicking game and opportunities that it provided. One that’s really, I would say, honestly during the course of my coaching career, has kind of traveled that long and winding road from when I came into the league.

Sudden attack game download