Punters
Net and gross yards over expected per punt: where opponents started, and how far each punt travelled to where it was fielded, against the season’s average punter from the same spots in the same weather.
Distance vs. results
Each dot is a qualified punter. Right = longer than expected to where the punt was fielded; up = opponents started deeper than expected. Dashed lines: the league average.
Leaderboard
Click a column to sort. Ranks (net yards over expected per punt) are among qualified punters: at least two punts per team game.
How these are computed
- Expected: our frozen punt model with the punter set to average. It knows the line of scrimmage, wind, temperature, rain or snow, roof and altitude, with the era’s field-position trend.
- Net yards over expected = the receiving team’s expected start minus its actual start (positive = pinned deeper), on punts the receiver fielded or got back. Blocks, return touchdowns and kicking-team recoveries are counted in their own columns instead. Coverage and the returner affect it too.
- Gross yards over expected = the distance to where the punt was caught, downed, went out of bounds or was muffed, against the expected distance for that kind of finish. It’s the purest measure of the punter’s leg.
- Each season’s league-average punter is 0: parts of the punt model are fitted to recent seasons, so raw values drift by era, and centring each season removes that.
- ± is a standard error. Year to year, punters repeat more than kickers: per-punt net yards over expected correlate 0.29 with the next season, gross 0.47 (40+ punts).
- Stabilised (the Numbers switch): each rate pulled toward the season’s average by an amount set by how much one season can tell apart (fitted on 1999–2017 by splitting seasons in half; on 2018–2025 it predicted the other half of a season better than the raw rate). The range after each number is a 90% interval; after the rank, the range of ranks it could plausibly hold.