He is the vestigial organ of a football team, a remnant of the time before the forward pass. And yet, now and again, he can be vitally important.
November 23, 2025
The Los Angeles Rams punter Ethan Evans kicks during a game against the San Francisco 49ers, on November 9th.Photograph by Scot Tucker / AP
During a typical game, Ethan Evans, the punter for the Los Angeles Rams, is synonymous with disappointment. All punters are. No fan cheers when their team’s punter jogs onto the field facing fourth and long. His job is to concede possession—to send the ball back into the control of the opposing team, and to put them in the worst possible field position. Punters, historically, have a bit of a suspect reputation, with their un-grass-stained uniforms. When a punter was drafted in the third round of the 2012 N.F.L. draft, an analyst famously cried, “Let me tell you something, people: punters are people, too.” True, but they are also the game’s vestigial organs, a remnant of the days when football was “foot ball,” before the invention of that modern horror, the forward pass.
Evans has the square jaw and athletic build of a tight end: six feet three, two-fifty and change. But his job involves a lot of waiting around, these days more than ever. The Rams have one of the best offenses in the league, and their coach, Sean McVeigh, is no longer the conservative fourth-down play caller that he was early in his career—nowadays, he heeds the analytical models that encourage keeping the quarterback on the field for fourth down, trying to keep possession. Even coaches not on the cutting edge have shifted away from punting in short-yardage situations, or when losing late in a close game; everyone now knows that going for the first down will, in many situations, give them better odds of winning. And so, increasingly, punters are sitting on the shelf. According to one metric, which seeks to capture a player’s over-all contribution to his team’s scoring, the best punter this season is the Colts’ Rigoberto Sanchez—and he didn’t take a single punt until the third week of the season.
Evans has taken two or fewer punts in five of the first eleven games, which would have been unusual only a decade ago. Last Sunday, though, against the Seattle Seahawks, he was busy. Seattle’s stifling defense had bottled up the Rams’ quarterback, Matthew Stafford. The team’s defense kept them in the game, harassing Seattle’s quarterback into an even worse day, which included four interceptions. But Seattle, like most N.F.L. teams these days, didn’t need much in the way of offense to score; they just needed to cross into Rams territory. The Seahawks’ kicker, Jason Myers, attempted five field goals in the game, including one of fifty-seven yards, which he converted. At the same time that punters have been getting less and less use, field-goal kickers, their clean-uniformed comrades, are being brought out for longer and longer attempts—and hitting them at a historically high rate. Yet another reason that teams don’t need to punt as much as they used to.
But when punters do get called upon, their punts can matter more than ever. Evans used to practice punting the same way he had in college, at Wingate University, a Division II school in North Carolina: by dropping the nose of the ball and driving it as high and as far as he could. This was how a lot of N.F.L. punters approached their art. But long punts up the center of the field gave the opposing team’s fast, explosive returners room to run. Even blasting the ball into or through the end zone, causing a touchback—which gives the offense the ball at their own twenty-yard line—became less appealing as field-goal kickers expanded their range, since offenses with that kind of field position were just a couple of first downs away from a decent chance at three points. Evans realized that he could no longer “just bomb punts all day” the way he once had. He needed a more varied and complicated approach—kicking the ball deep toward the sidelines, or throwing in a deliberately wobbly kick, or using his foot to slice the ball, changing the trajectory to give the returner less time to make a decision about which way to go.
Punters have started borrowing techniques from Australian-rules football, a sport in which kicking figures more prominently, and which is full of weird, swerving punts. There’s the “reverse banana,” which gives the ball an inverted swerve, and the “torp,” which is executed by holding the ball at an angle across the body and kicking so that it spirals like a torpedo. Some of the newer punters—including Michael Dickson, of the Seahawks, whom Evans was up against last Sunday—are from Australia. Young punters study techniques on YouTube and attend élite camps. Special-teams players, who really do have a lot of time on their hands, have begun experimenting both with the physics of sailing a ball through the air and with new ways to confuse returners and get them off balance. In the twenty-tens, the Ravens’ special-teams unit called themselves the “R. & D. Department,” the long snapper Morgan Cox told me.
Cox, who played with the Ravens for a decade, is now on the Tennessee Titans, where the punter is Johnny Hekker, who used to play for the Rams. In his prime, Hekker was so proficient at maximizing field position that a reporter for the _Times_ wrote a piece titled “The N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player Might Be . . . a Punter?” The headline was only partly tongue in cheek: for all the anonymity of punters, they can have a significant effect on the game. Cox told me that when special teams get a dead ball inside the ten-yard line, it “completely changes the defensive play-calling.” Offenses, pinned back against their own end zone, can tighten up. But it’s not easy to bounce a ball sideways, out of bounds, just shy of the end zone, or to have it cross the sideline with precision. It’s harder still when the pressure mounts late in a close game.
And it’s especially hard against the game’s best punt returners. The Seahawks have a great one, Rashid Shaheed. On Sunday, Evans punted to Shaheed and the Seahawks six times, three times in the fourth quarter alone. The last punt took place with less than two minutes remaining in the game; the Rams were leading the Seahawks by two. If Evans could pin the ball as close to the goal line as possible—without going over it—he could effectively win the game. He blasted it fifty yards toward the far sideline, high over Shaheed’s head, into the far or “coffin” corner. Kickers used to send it there with some regularity, because it’s hard for returners to escape up the field from that spot. But a ball aimed there will often end up in the end zone, causing a touchback, which the Rams were trying to avoid. Evans’s punt bounced at the two-yard line, then past the one, before careening out of bounds. Perfect. The Seahawks still managed to push the ball up the field far enough to call in their kicker for a sixty-one-yard field-goal attempt as time expired. Had they started the drive at the twenty, they likely could have got an easy field goal. Instead, from that distance, the kick fell short and wide right, and the Rams held on.
Evans only started punting seriously in college; he was a kickoff specialist when he reached Wingate University. He speaks in a relaxed Southern drawl, and seems to take things in stride. I asked Evans if he visualizes or prepares for games in any special way. “I’m kind of a go-with-the-flow guy,” he said—though he does set his phone to Do Not Disturb, in order to focus. When Evans looked at his phone, the day after the game, he learned that his game-winning punt had gone viral, a rare experience for a punter. Holy cow, he thought. ♦