Special Teams in College Football: The Hidden Points

Offense and defense get the snaps, the storylines, and nearly all the analysis. The third phase — special teams — gets ignored until a missed chip-shot field goal or a punt returned 80 yards decides a game everyone thought was about something else. Special teams is a small share of a team's overall quality, but it is a real share, and a uniquely volatile one. Understanding how to value it properly — and why it regresses harder than offense or defense — is one of the quieter edges in college football analysis.

Field goals: makes over expected, not just percentage

Raw field-goal percentage is a trap, because not all attempts are equal. A 28-yarder and a 52-yarder both count once in the make column, but one is nearly automatic and the other is a coin flip even for good kickers. The right way to judge a kicker is makes over expected: for every attempt, estimate the make probability given the distance (learned from thousands of historical kicks), sum those probabilities to get "expected makes," and compare to what actually went through.

A kicker who goes, say, 18-for-22 from long range has done something very different from a kicker who goes 18-for-22 mostly from inside 35. The first beat expectation; the second may have fallen short of it. And college kicking is meaningfully more variable than the NFL — a wider talent spread, younger legs, less consistent operations (snap and hold) — so distance matters even more, and a single season's field-goal percentage is a noisy guide to a college kicker's true ability.

The hidden currency: field position

Punting and returns rarely score directly, so they're easy to undervalue. But every flip of field position carries expected-points value. A drive starting at your own 15 is worth far less than one starting at midfield, and the gap can be put in points — which is exactly the framework laid out in field position and expected points. A punter who consistently flips the field, or a coverage unit that pins opponents deep, is quietly adding fractions of a point on every possession, and those fractions sum to real territory over a season.

The same logic runs through returns. A punt returner doesn't need a touchdown to help; bringing the ball out to the 35 instead of fair-catching at the 12 hands the offense a materially better starting point. Net punting (gross distance minus return yards, accounting for touchbacks) and average starting field position are the numbers that capture this, far better than gross punt distance alone — a 50-yard boot returned 25 yards is worse than a 40-yard punt downed at the 5.

Kickoffs, touchbacks, and the rulebook's thumb on the scale

Kickoff rules shape how much field-position value is even available to win or lose. The touchback spot is set by rule, and college football has moved that machinery over time. A notable recent change: beginning with the 2018 season, the NCAA allowed a fair catch of a kickoff inside the 25-yard line to be treated as a touchback, spotting the ball at the 25 — a rule designed to reduce high-speed collisions on returns by giving returners a safer option. The broad effect of touchback rules is to compress the field-position swing on kickoffs: when most kickoffs end at the 25 either way, there's less for a return unit to gain or a coverage unit to lose. Where exactly the lines sit in the current rulebook, and how often kickoffs are actually returned versus touched back this season, are details worth checking against the present rules rather than assumed.

The outsized swings: blocks and return touchdowns

Most special-teams plays nudge field position a few yards. A few detonate. A blocked punt, a blocked field goal returned for a score, or a kick returned the distance can be worth a touchdown or a two-possession swing in a single snap — the kind of play that decides a game by itself. These events are rare and largely unpredictable from year to year, which is precisely why they make special teams so noisy: a team's special-teams rating can be inflated or sunk by two or three explosive plays that there's little reason to expect will recur.

An illustrative split of the swing

The figures below are a clearly-hypothetical example, not a real team, meant only to show how field-position value accumulates. Imagine a punt unit's season:

Spread a fraction of a point across dozens of opponent drives a season and the punt unit alone is worth a couple of points of net margin — modest next to offense and defense, but not nothing, and entirely invisible in the box score.

Why it regresses — and how ratings fold it in

Because so much of special-teams output rides on rare events (long returns, blocks) and on a single college kicker's hot or cold stretch, it is the noisiest of the three phases. A team that grades out elite on special teams one year has a real tendency to slide toward average the next, more so than its offense or defense would. Good models account for this by regressing special-teams contributions harder and weighting them appropriately small. Comprehensive ratings like SP+ include a special-teams component precisely so the phase is counted — field goals, returns, field-position effects and all — but they keep it in proportion: a real, separately-measured slice of team quality that is deliberately not allowed to swamp the two phases that decide far more snaps.

The current ratings

To see which teams are actually winning the third phase this season — the field-goal efficiency leaders, the best net-punting and field-position units, and how those translate into a special-teams rating — you need live, current data.

Special teams will never be the main story, and it shouldn't be. But it is hidden points — a small, real, and volatile piece of every team's quality. Value it by expectation, not by raw percentage; respect that it regresses; and don't let one return touchdown convince you a unit is great. The kicking game decides more games than it gets credit for, and almost none of the ones you'd guess.