Green Bay Packers: Wild Card round special teams recap
By Kenn Korb
Jacob Schum
Punts:
- 48 yards (NYG 38); Downed
- 31 yards (NYG 11); Fair Catch
- 40 yards (NYG 34); 0 yard return (NYG 34)
- 58 yards (NYG 5); 3 yard return (NYG 8)
- 37 yards (NYG 7); 1 yard return (NYG 8)
- 37 yards (NYG 26); Downed
This was Schum’s best performance of the season, period.
He’s had other good ones (as well as some god-awful showings, of course), but the combination of high usage and individual kick success hadn’t combined to reach this level yet during his Packers tenure.
Schum showed off a multitude of different positively successful kicks here, with not a single one of them able to be labelled as a bad attempt at the end of the day.
If there was one though, it’d be that first kick. That one let the Giants begin their drive close to midfield, but it was punted from the Green Bay 14; it traveled almost half a football field before eventually coming to a stop.
The ball could’ve been kicked better in theory, but as I’ve said all year distance on kicks is Schum’s weakest area as a player; we can’t exactly expect that to magically not be the case all of a sudden. He could’ve hit it better too (it did have to bounce and roll its way to that end point), but with distance kicking being a problem for Schum and him knowing he had to put some leg behind it, he probably didn’t get the best hit on it.
Still, results matter, and the end result was a kick which was short enough of the returner that he didn’t try to grab it; from there the extra yardage picked up from the rolling, while randomly and fortuitously in Schum’s favor, undoubtedly gets added to his pile of chalked-up yardage.
Past that, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything to argue against. His shortest kick was short due to field position and resulted in pinning the Giants deep in their own territory.
The total yardage picked up on his punts was a mere 4 yards, with only three of the six even seeing a return attempted on them.
This should tell you all you need to know about his showing: Across his six punts, Schum picked up a net average of 41.3 yards.
That number put him at #3 among wild card round punters, and would have tied for #9 among regular season punters. It was also by far his best output in a game where he punted 5+ times this year (his next-best was 38.6 yards, versus Minnesota in Week 2).
It doesn’t seem likely that Schum could manage this level of a showing if he has a big workload again against Dallas, but he has shown it is at least a possibility.