Football Review...special teams, kickoff coverage

Moving through special teams....BG's kickoff coverage was not especially good (11th in the MAC) in 2011.  However, as noted in our review of BG's kickoff returns, being just 2 yards better would have been 7th, and who really cares about 2 yards.  Touchbacks are good, but BG only had 2 of those (conference) play.

BG was 9th in depth of kicks, which is more where the problem was, and held teams to 20 yards per actual return.

One interesting thing I noticed...we had 3 guys kick off.  Burkhardt 49 times, Phillips 8 times and Stein 6 times.  Phillips was getting 66 yards on his kicks, Stein 62 and Burkhardt 58.  (Keep in mind that sometimes a kicker is told to kick it short).

Oh, and if touchbacks are good, then out of bound kicks are very bad, and BG had 6 kicks out of bounds, which is 10% of kickoffs.  Burkhardt alone put 5 O-B.

Based on this, I'd say the players doing the coverage were reasonably effective, and the kicking side of it was less than stellar, which has been typical over the past few years, although BG had a good kickoff game the year before.  The best coverage teams in the MAC are getting double figure touchbacks to start with, and going from there.

One last note that I haven't see anywhere else....Falcon Fodder reported in the notes for the OU game that the Falcons honored Jerry Phillips as a senior before the game.  It was only his junior year, but he may have opted to graduate.