Ryan Rehkow and the Art of Being an NFL Punter

The former BYU punter is competing for a starting job with the Cincinnati Bengals this preseason.

Spend enough time loitering at football practices and you’ll learn to listen for the noise.

The unmistakable cannon fire of ball hitting foot. There’s a distinct difference in the way it sounds for the premier power punters in the game. In 2022, it was Ryan Stonehouse at the East-West Shrine Bowl who turned heads with his booming leg in Las Vegas. Later that week, Jordan Stout pounded kick after kick into the tunnel in the pouring rain at the Senior Bowl in Mobile.

It’s not a foolproof way to tell who’s destined for NFL success. Many big-legged punters lack even adequate ball control, sacrificing placement for power. And so, once you’re used to the noise, you stop turning your head to see where it came from.

But when you stand at the opposite four-yard line, debating with your coworkers where to eat lunch before media availability, and a ball rolls to your feet after you hear that noise, it’s notable. When it happens a second time, your eyebrows raise.

When it happens a third time, it’s time to talk to that guy.

Ryan Rehkow is surprised somebody wants to talk to him. After all, he is a punter.

His brother, Austin, was also a punter. Eventually, at least. The older Rehkow brother set a Washington state record in 2012 with a 67-yard field goal, setting him up as the kicker and punter at Idaho from 2013-16. Ironically enough, Lance Zierlein’s NFL.com profile of Austin coming into the 2017 draft questioned if he had enough leg strength to be a full-time kicker in the NFL.

Austin entered the league as a kicker anyway, losing a competition to Stephen Hauschka in Buffalo in 2017. He transitioned to punter and bounced around the NFL, AAF, and XFL until 2021.

With a brother capable of doing both and a leg powerful enough to kick field goals - Ryan’s longest career punt is 83 yards - it’s somewhat curious that he didn’t follow in Austin’s footsteps.

“In high school, I did field goals and punting as well. But then I think kind of learning from [Austin’s] situation, he was almost too good at both of them that people were like, ‘Oh, we don’t really know what you’re going to do at the next level.’ And so for me, I always kind of leaned towards punting,” Rehkow told Two Gap at the Shrine Bowl in January.

This lesson could be what makes Rehkow stick in the NFL. Because instead of kicking, Rehkow learned how to hold.

A History Lesson

For most of NFL history, the backup quarterback and the punter have largely been the same person. Steve Spurrier was the backup quarterback and primary punter for the 49ers in the 1970s. Danny White was Roger Staubach’s backup and the primary punter for the Cowboys from 1975-84.

When the NFL began raiding Australian rules football for punters in the 1990s, a practice pioneered by Chargers and Vikings punter Darren Bennett, the league began shifting more towards rostering a guy who was there only to punt the ball. The last quarterback/punter, Tom Tupa, converted to full time punter with the Browns in 1994.

But because quarterbacks and punters used to be one and the same, the backup quarterback was also the primary field goal holder well into the 2010s. The argument for keeping passers in that role feels intuitive: it’s easier to fake a field goal with a guy who can throw the ball, quarterbacks have better ball skills if there’s a bad snap, etc.

But, as Bill Belichick will tell you: “If your punter can hold, then the amount of snaps and time that those guys get to practice together, work together, meet together, watch film together, watch slow-motions films, concentrate on the technique as opposed to the backup quarterback or somebody like that who has a lot of other responsibilities. It’s just a time – if your holder can be your punter, then the amount of practice time, consistency, preparation time that those guys have together just so out-weighs what it would be with any other player.”

This change, however, has largely not reached college football, where the holder is frequently a backup quarterback. There are a myriad of reasons for this - college rosters are twice as big as NFL rosters, allowing someone like a fourth-string quarterback to both exist and be expendable enough to miss offensive practice time to practice holding instead. College football has never had rules about how many quarterbacks can play in a game - the NFL used to rule your first two quarterbacks ineligible if a third quarterback entered the game before the fourth quarter.

Many college kickers, historically speaking, are also college punters. Like Austin, or Chiefs punter Matt Araiza, or Giants kicker Graham Gano. This makes it impossible to be the holder, because you’re the one kicking the field goal.

Therein lies one of the secrets of becoming an NFL punter: it’s not really about the punting.

The Australian Exception

In 2023, 61 of the 133 teams in the FBS had an Australian punter on their roster. Eight of the last eleven winners of the Ray Guy Award have been Australian, including 2023 winner and rookie Bears punter Tory Taylor. Despite the prevalence of Aussies in college, only six of the NFL’s 37 punters in 2023 were Australian - Lou Hedley (Saints), Michael Dickson (Seahawks), Cameron Johnston (Texans), Mitch Wishnowsky (49ers), Brad Wing (Steelers), and Arryn Siposs (Eagles).

The results were mixed - Wishnowsky, Johnston, and Dickson were rated as above-average punters by Puntalytics, Hedley was the fourth-worst punter in the league by Puntalytics’ metrics, and Wing and Siposs played in four games combined.

These metrics do not take into account holding, which is typically not an inherently Australian skill. Almost all Aussie punters come from ProKick, a training facility in Melbourne that turns Aussie rules football players into college punters. It’s unclear what sort of emphasis they place on holding in their training regimen.

It’s also largely irrelevant, because NFL teams think Australian punters are weird.

In 2018, league scouts were sky-high on Dickson coming out of Texas, enough so that Seattle was forced to trade up into the fifth round to secure him. A year prior, in 2017, teams had no idea what to make of Johnston, who wound up going undrafted and not starting for the Eagles until 2018.

The difference was simple: Dickson (usually) punted the traditional way at Texas. Johnston was a rugby-style punter.

Rugby-style punting relies less on hangtime and more on topspin, which causes the ball to tumble forward the same way a traditional onside kick might. It’s an effective strategy in college football because every player is allowed to advance downfield as soon as the ball is snapped - ergo, rugby punters who hold onto the ball longer don’t need to worry about not producing enough hangtime.

This does not work in the NFL. The league actually specifically designs against it: only gunners are allowed to advance downfield before the ball is kicked, a rule that has existed for decades. This means that hangtime is the most important skill for a field-flipping NFL punter, one of the reasons that some are skeptical about the way Araiza’s low-rising lasers will translate to the pros.

While ProKick does spend about 70% of its training on traditional punting, according to founder Nathan Chapman, many of its pupils rugby punt when they get to college, because it works really well. But when a player hits the draft circuit, it often confuses NFL scouts, which is what happened to Johnston.

Chapman told ESPN in 2019 that Johnston’s feedback from scouts largely amounted to “We don’t know what the heck we’re looking at,” even after the Aussie put together a strong showing of traditional punting at that year’s combine.

Perhaps that’s why only five Australians are set to be full-time punters in the NFL this season - Dickson, Wishnowsky, Johnston, Taylor, and either Hedley or rookie Matthew Hayball, who are competing for the Saints job. Meanwhile, 2022 Ray Guy winner Adam Korsak is languishing in the CFL, his punts deemed too weird for the NFL.

So, we’ve narrowed the criteria down further: if you want to be an NFL punter, don’t kick field goals in college and don’t be Australian (or just don’t punt like one).

Punting Holding is Winning

Charles McDonald wrote in April that the most important skill for college long snappers hoping to crack the pro ranks is blocking, not snapping. It’s a little bit different for punting, where the margins are a bit wider, but holding is still a crucial skill.

Don’t believe me? Let’s examine the career of Corey Bojorquez.

Despite averaging more than 45 yards per punt in all but one of his six NFL seasons, with a long of at least 60 in every year of his career while putting nearly 40% of his kicks inside the 20, Bojorquez has lost two “punting” competitions. In 2021 in Buffalo, Bojorquez lost the job to Matt Haack, a far inferior punter, because of Bojorquez’s documented issues as a holder, referenced in this 2022 article on Haack’s preseason battle with Araiza.

Bojorquez landed with Green Bay, where he lasted only one season before losing the job to Pat O’Donnell, with general manager Brian Gutekunst specifically mentioning holding as a primary reason.

This Reddit post from the 2022 season does a good job illustrating the statistical impact of Bojorquez’s struggles as a holder. It is also worth noting that Browns kicker Dustin Hopkins continued an impressively accurate run with Bojorquez as his holder in 2023, signifying that perhaps the punter has finally figured it out.

It is also sort of ironic that Gutekunst pointed to O’Donnell’s consistency as a holder, because the Packers punter was also a pretty bad holder until 2020! Below are the graphs of the career accuracy numbers for the primary kicker O’Donnell has played with from 2014-19.

With Robbie Gould in Chicago from 2014-15:

(Of note: Gould’s precipitous drop in 2019 coincides with Wishnowsky’s rookie year in San Francisco.)

Connor Barth in 2016-17:

Barth was replaced by Mike Nugent (5-5) and Cairo Santos (1-2) in 2017.

Cody Parkey in the 2018 season that drove Matt Nagy insane:

Parkey’s only worse season by accuracy was in 2015, when he made 75% of his kicks on only 4 attempts.

Eddy Pineiro in 2019:

(Pineiro did not kick in the 2020 season.)

It’s not until Cairos Santos in 2020 that Chicago finds any sort of competent kicking - Santos’ 93.8% and 86.7% percentages in 2020 and 2021 are by far the highest marks of any Bears kicker since O’Donnell’s career started in 2014.

Being bad at holding is a legitimate thing that you can be, although it is a solvable issue. It’s not necessarily limiting, either: if you have inhuman leg strength like Bojorquez or happen to overlap with a head coach turning into the Joker like O’Donnell, you can still have a lengthy career in the NFL.

You do, of course, have to get there first, which Tommy Heatherly found out in 2022.

Heatherly punted, kicked field goals, and handled kickoffs in both high school and junior college before heading to Florida International. While he wasn’t the kicker at FIU, he was the backup kicker, so he never held in college in case he was pressed into field goal action. His first exposure to holding was at the Shrine Bowl.

“It was nice to be able to have guys who could critique me, tell me everything I did wrong, everything I did right. Neither one of them held up on me. They let me know if I screwed up, and I like that,” Heatherly told me of the Shrine Bowl kickers in a 2022 interview.

As part of his pre-draft training, Heatherly took 100 snaps a day from the left and right sides. Despite interviewing with half the league with a resume that included an average of 47.1 yards per punt in his senior season and a C-USA Special Teams Player of the Year award, he lasted less than three months with the Dolphins and never got another NFL opportunity.

Holding, as it turns out, is really hard. But why?

There’s a Lot of Different Ways to Hold the Football

“I've worked with a lot of kickers. Some are very particular - hey, it needs to be at this spot, this lean, this tilt. Other guys are like, just put it down there and I’ll make it. At the end of the day, your job as a holder is to set the kicker up the best that you can,” Rehkow told Two Gap.

Rehkow did that for BYU kicker Jake Oldroyd, the Cougars’ all-time leading scorer and no. 3 in career field goals made. His 2023 kicker, Will Ferrin, missed only 4 kicks all season in his first year as a starter.

Asked about how that experience sets someone like him apart from an inexperienced holder, Rehkow said “It’s like, I’ve done this a million times. This is second nature to me now. Whereas if you’re having to transition, you might be thinking about it almost too much in that sense. And you can kind of get a little bit off your mark, or whatever it is.”

“As dumb as it is, I’m sure there’s a lot of different ways to hold the football. And so at the end of the day, it’s like, work with your kicker and whatever they want, you’re just like, ‘Yes, I will do that. I will get it right.’ You’re just kind of at their mercy, and you want to put them in the best position possible.”

That chemistry often requires disruption of previous rapport. Rehkow is working with Bengals kicker Evan McPherson, who last season had Brad Robbins holding for him. Robbins is still in Cincinnati competing for the punter job this season, meaning that Rehkow is trying to make up a deficit while having to split reps with his incumbent opponent.

Robbins struggled as an actual punter last season for the Bengals, to the point that Cincinnati doled out a decent amount of money to Texas Tech punter Austin McNamara after the 2024 draft. But McNamara was waived earlier this week, leaving just Rehkow and Robbins competing for the job.

Room to Grow

Rehkow knows he isn’t a finished product. He learned that lesson again quickly when an undrafted deal with the Chiefs lasted barely a month before he was waived in favor of Araiza, the lone punter currently on Kansas City’s roster. It took six weeks for the opportunity in Cincinnati to materialize.

Speaking to Two Gap in January, Rehkow said that every year is an evolution: “Between my sophomore and junior year [at BYU], I wanted to get a lot more consistent and be able to place the ball better. That junior year, I feel like I was almost focused too much on what I had learned in the offseason and was so mechanical. I feel like I was able to really reflect on that going into this year.”

“I think one of the strengths that I have in my game is hang time. And I feel like there was times in college where I didn’t get to show that off enough. Because it was like, I want the distance, I want to be able to show that. Of course you always want to have that. You just want to hit big balls.”

“But I think the next evolution is just understanding there’s a time and a place for that. Where, shoot, maybe we’re backed up and we do need a long one, but just kind of having that self-awareness of, okay. I don’t need to do that every single time. Like there’s some times where we just need to make the returner work for it, keep the team pinned back, and then let the defense go to work.”

Rehkow put that into action on Saturday, rotating reps with Robbins as their punting competition gets going in earnest. Rehkow’s first punt was a 50 yarder down to Tampa Bay’s 15 yard line, with a ten yard return by Trey Palmer on a kick that didn’t have Rehkow’s usual hangtime. He held for Evan McPherson’s missed 58 yarder as time expired in the first half. A 59 yard punt from his own 10 yard line flipped the field even with a 12 yard return from Tanner Knue. A second 59 yarder bounded into the end zone for a touchback.

It was a good, but likely not job-clinching, performance. Rehkow knows what’s at stake. But he’s not going to let it stop him from staying loose, a lesson he says he learned going into his senior year at BYU.

“Hey, I’m the best at what I do. Why am I focused on something so small when it’s like, I trust my body. I know that it’s going to go out there and take care of business. Every time I stepped on the field, it was like, let’s just put on a show, let’s see how much fun that we can have.”

Saturday may not have been the standout showcase Rehkow wanted, but if reports out of Bengals training camp are any indication, there will be a lot more fun in Rehkow’s future.