Special teams may not be as "special" as we're led to believe

That said, it'd be nice if Nebraska was simply fine in that phase of the game in 2024.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Football is a strange game. In baseball every at-bat can be defined by out or not out. That’s it on a microscopic level. It’s a little trickier in basketball, but every possession is basically score or not score.¹ Football doesn’t really work that way.

It’s a war game,² specifically a land war game. As Iowa has proven over more than 20 years under Kirk Ferentz, you can win games through shrewd real estate maneuverings. You might watch an Iowa game and think, “it’s like they’re not even interested in offense,” but this is just savvy capitalism at work. It’s the least-sexy, most-American approach to football, but it works more often than it doesn’t. Do the Ferentz era Hawkeyes turn a profit, measured by their record, most years? Yes, they do.

Despite that, the line you hear over and over again about special teams is that it’s the “hidden third” of the game. I don’t buy it because it’s not. In 2023, Nebraska’s offense or defense was on the field for 1,527 plays. The special teams took care of 291 additional plays. That’s roughly one-sixth of the game, which doesn’t mean special teams aren’t important. They’re just not on level footing with offense or defense.

That said, I think better special teams play is something of a shortcut to better results for the Huskers in 2024.

I used the SP+ unit rankings from 2023 as my baseline to test my Exposure Theory of special teams (i.e., offense and defense are more important because they simply represent a greater percentage of the game). The correlation coefficient in 2023 between a team’s offensive SP+ rating and its overall rating was roughly the same as the same number for defense and its correlation to overall rating. Special teams trailed far behind in terms of how much of the overall rating it could explain.

That was good, in my mind. It stands to reason with what we see on the field. Teams that are almost all offense, no defense, can be good in the same way that teams that are the opposite can. The really good teams display at least some competency in both and need to be excellent on at least one side of the ball. Special teams comes after all of that. If you could wave a magic wand and grant your team excellence on offense, defense or special teams for a season, choose offense or defense twice as often as you choose special teams.

I don’t think that’s a one-year anomaly either. Checking the same number in the previous two seasons, offense and defense were basically equal, and special teams on its own was not a “third” of the overall ranking. When checking if special teams play explained more of offense or defense over that span, it slightly favored defense, which made sense to me. (See also: Iowa)

Anyway, enough boring, disclaimer-type stuff.

For as limited as Nebraska’s offense was last year (123rd nationally in SP+), the defense was inversely good (6th) but special teams (105th) didn’t get to neutral, which made a difference during a 5-7 season. That’s really the role of special teams play. It’s a tie-breaker, not the game itself.

This may run contrary to how you feel on any given Sunday morning because special teams play, due to its limited nature, is almost designed to be noticed. You notice when the return game is a nothing, which is most of the time given the current rules. Special teams touchdowns, rare as they are, often don’t get full credit for the anomalies they are. Bad punts and missed field goals, however, stand out more than good punts and made field goals. It’s just the nature of the game, human behavior and how we’re conditioned to consume football.

But with a Nebraska defense in 2024 that projects as, at worst, nearly as good as last year’s and an offense that almost couldn’t be worse outside of major coaching malfeasance, special teams are poised to again have an exaggerated impact on what we notice. It might be the tie-breaker.

Teams that don’t need a tie-breaker—Georgia, Ohio State, Alabama, Michigan, et al—might get by with average or worse special teams. That’s not Nebraska, which is still trying to scale the reclamation mountain. Unless the Huskers are going to put out a top-25 offense and defense this year, special teams are a differentiator between, say, 6-6 and 8-4.

Tristan Alvano, as a true freshman kicker, made 9-of-15 field goal attempts last season (60%).

“That’s not good enough for us to win more than five games, probably” special teams coordinator Ed Foley said this week, “so we have to get that percentage up significantly.”

The average team in 2023 made 75% of its field goals. For Nebraska and Alvano, being average would’ve meant two more made field goals, but two more makes is the difference between being outscored on the season (216-219) and not. Maybe it’s the difference between going to a bowl game and not.

Point is not to lay this at the feet of Alvano—he’ll be better in 2024, I believe—but to highlight how slim the special teams margin can be. Would better punting have meant the difference? Would one big return?

It all adds up, which is the case for football in general but it’s particularly the case on special teams. Being great in that area would no doubt help Nebraska, but I’m interested in what simply being average could do. They may not be as “special” as offense or defense, but not having to worry about them would be nice too.

1. I feel a bit guilty here for leaving off a simplification of hockey, one of North America’s four major sports, but I did not grow up in or close to Canada, so I have little idea what defines hockey. I have not tried to rise above my raising with hockey, and I am admitting that here. Apologies to hockey and its fans in advance.

2. I know this characterization can be problematic, and it should be if you draw a line between the temporary suffering experienced after losing a football game and the actual human suffering of war. If you don’t do that, however, there’s a fairly common theory—forwarded by multiple football pundits, young and old—that football became so big in the South because it was essentially a stand-in for the Civil War, which ended not long before college football began. When I was growing up, often the only football you could watch on Christmas Day was the Blue-Gray Football Classic, an all-star game in Montgomery, Alabama. Why was this game, which started in 1939 and continued uninterrupted through 2001, called that? To quote from its Wikipedia entry: “The format pitted players who attended college in the states of the former Confederacy, the ‘Grays’, who wore white jerseys, against players who attended school in the northern half of the country, the ‘Blues’, who wore blue jerseys, and also sometimes including players from western teams.” Wow.

I’m starting to feel old—a fairly recent development, thankfully—but that was a thing that happened in my lifetime. And I just watched it on Christmas because I was 11 and at my grandparents’ house, desperate for anything that would let me just be mostly alone and 11. You weren’t a very good party guest as that age.