Preparing NFL kickers’ footballs: Do’s, don’ts and a race against the clock (2024)

The NFL rulebook specifically prohibits the following things from being done to the football used by kickers and punters during a game:

• Subjecting the football to high heat (heaters, blow dryers, dryers, etc.).

• Submersingthe football in water.

• Altering the surface of the football (including, but not limited to, use of a buffing machine, attaching a Wilson-branded ball brush to a machine, non-Wilson branded brushes, wire brushes or other similar tools).

• Altering the shape of the football (including, but not limited to, kneeling or standing on, bouncing, throwing, using a hard surface or otherwise exerting excess pressure).

• Inflating or deflating the football at any point during the process.

Steve Hoffman has done four of the five, and he probably would have done that last one, too, if he thought it would have worked.

“I imagine guys have tried to put helium in them and everything else,” Hoffman said. “Somebody actually did a study about that, but it didn’t help.”

In the NFL, finding ways to maximize the kicking game is worth the effort. The combined impact and capriciousness of the act of kicking is a reason why. The regular season and playoffs saw 34 games won by a field goal in the final minute, including the one Sunday that sent the Chiefs to the Super Bowl. The playoffs also saw Brett Maher, a kicker for the Cowboys who tied for the third-most points scored in the NFL this season, suddenly miss four consecutive extra-point kicks in a wild-card win at Tampa Bay.

Hoffman worked for the Cowboys from 1989 to 2004. Hired by Jimmy Johnson as special teams coordinator and kicking coach, he stayed through Barry Switzer, Chan Gailey, Dave Campo and part of Bill Parcells’ tenure. He came up in the NFL in a simpler time before the rulebook got so fastidious about who can do what the 11- to 11.25-inch, 14- to 15-ounce oblong object that kickers and punters try to make bend to their will.

“Dude, I’ve heard so many stories,” said Shayne Graham, a former NFL kicker who spent time with 14 teams and made one Pro Bowl before founding Elite Winning Solutions, a special teams training and consulting firm.

Stories about balls being put into industrial dryers with pieces of turf, stories about footballs left all day long in saunas, stories about stacks of weight plates being affixed to the balls’ pointed end and left overnight. Those stories are the reason the league now prescribes a pregame process for preparing kicking balls that even the most inside insiders have no clue about.

It starts when an equipment manager from each team goes to the officials’ locker room three hours before kickoff of every NFL game to hold a draft of six, brand-new Wilson footballs that are shipped in their original packaging to the hotel room of the referee the day before the game. That draft and the process that follows could decide who wins the Super Bowl on Feb. 12.

Sound like hyperbole? Consider that the Chiefs won the AFC Championship Game with a 45-yard field goal from Harrison Butker that might not have been good from 50 yards. Also consider that at least one kicker this season has blamed missing a critical kick on having to use his second kicking ball. What’s a second kicking ball and why would that matter? That’s what we’re here to explain.

In the pregame draft in the officials’ room, the home team’s equipment manager picks first, the visiting team’s manager picks second and so on until each team has three balls. The equipment managers then have one hour to prepare those balls in their locker room — under the rules, of course. The only equipment allowed is a wet towel, a dry towel and a “new Wilson-branded ball brush, or a team-supplied Wilson-branded ball brush, that has not been altered in any way.”

“I did not know that,” Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot said. “There needs to be a documentary on that.”

Even Hoffman, who is now a senior assistant for special teams with the Falcons, didn’t know exactly how far the NFL has gone to stop the shenanigans.

“Years ago, kickers and punters would prep the footballs any way they wanted to during the week and break them in and get them softened up and make them easier to kick and punt,” he said. “It got to the point where it was just ridiculous. The balls were so fat and broken in.”

Hoffman worked with the Cowboys’ kickers and punters to break in the balls while they were doing the same thing with the footballs quarterback Troy Aikman would use in the game.

“We used to take the balls to the racquetball courts with baseball bats and beat them up against the walls,” he said. “We’d throw it up in the air and bash it with a baseball bat. Then we’d put them in a clothes dryer with damp towels. Then we’d take those big floor polishing machines and turn them upside down and run the balls over them. Sometimes we’d get it too slick and then we’d have to rub them down with alcohol to dry them out.”

Hoffman and his peers were so good at their behind-the-scenes craft that in 1999, the NFL decided it needed to put a stop to the antics and issued its not-to-do list for ball preparation. Those rules still apply to both kicking balls and the balls used by each offense. The difference is that the balls used by each offense can be prepared throughout the week and “may be tossed and approved by the home team quarterbacks on the days leading up to the game” (but not used in practice) while the kicking balls “will be sealed by the manufacturer with a special tape and not opened until the day of the game by the referee.”

“If you touch a quarterback ball versus a K-ball, it’s completely different,” Falcons kicker Younghoe Koo said.

After the rule change, kickers went from kicking what Graham described as “that nice, soft backyard football” to what by comparison felt like a rock.

“A lot of these wily veterans had really been breaking these balls down,” Graham said. “They decided to start instituting the K-ball. They were basically trying to make the field goals and kickoffs harder. Kickers were just getting better and better.”

Hoffman remembers former Vikings kicker Gary Anderson being to blame.

“Anderson went on a streak (making 122 consecutive kicks), and everybody went crazy about it so they changed the rule,” Hoffman said.

The problem was that the 1999 rule change allowed only the officials to prep the kicking balls once they were opened on game day. What that meant, Hoffman said, is they got no preparation at all.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever grabbed a brand-new football out of the box, but it’s like the seams have ridges and they’re hard as rocks,” Hoffman said. “That’s like asking a major-league shortstop to play every game with a brand-new glove.”

Kickers and punters complained and complained about the new rule, Graham said, but their concerns were ignored until Jan. 7, 2007. That’s the day Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo dropped the snap on what would have been a 19-yard go-ahead field goal with 1:19 left against the Seahawks in the first round of the NFC playoffs. It allowed Seattle to prevail, 21-20.

Video replays of the game show a shiny ball glistening in the stadium lights on its way to Romo’s hands, prompting conspiracy theorists at the time to wonder if someone from the home-team Seahawks had snuck a bad ball into the game in some sort of elaborate sabotage. Nope, it was just the result of the NFL’s misguided rule, Graham said.

“All it took was for a big-time quarterback like Tony Romo … dropping a snap before the NFL said, ‘Hey, you know what? We should probably let them have some time to break the ball down before the game for a little bit,’” Graham said.

The following offseason, the competition committee approved a change that allowed a team representative 45 minutes to prep the balls before the game under the supervision of the officiating crew.

In 2020 the league arrived at the current rule, which the rulebook spells out as: “For all games, six new footballs, sealed in a special box and shipped by the manufacturer to the Referee, will be opened in the officials’ locker room.” Once the boxes are opened and the equipment managers make their selections, the countdown clock starts.

“They will usually start by getting the ball as wet as they can get it and then they’ll take that sharp edge of the wooden brush and they will scrape it down to get those nubs as abrasive as they can,” Graham said. “Then they will take that top flat part of the brush and they will actually try to rub that flat edge on the ball really hard to take that abrasive side off. They will do that to the whole ball, and then break down the seams with the flat edge of the brush. If you ever look at an NFL K-ball, you will see those seams look a lot darker than the rest of the panels.”

CEO @Shaynegraham17 demonstrates step-by-step the @NFL's game day “K” ball process. Hey Equipment Managers: How'd he do? pic.twitter.com/PlL6Vb27il

— Elite Winning Solutions (@EWS_Mentality) December 21, 2022

The first ball is allowed to dry while the second ball gets its preparation, Graham said.

“Once that ball dries, they will aggressively brush it with the bristles,” he said. “It has to be dry for that because it’s creating almost a little buff. If you rubbed your finger on it, it would kind of squeak. Your finger will grip and squeak a little bit on the leather.”

Don’t tell an NFL kicker that this preparation process feels overly complex.

“The slightest variance that can give you any bit of comfort can mean the difference between having a job and not having a job,” Graham said.

The new system has given equipment managers a strategic decision to make before each game because they can use as much or as little time on each of their three footballs as they choose.

“Do you want to spend more time on one and two and none on the third?,” Koo said. “Or do you want to spend most of the time on the one and what if you lose it? If it goes over the net or whatever and you can’t find the ball, you get stuck with two. If it’s an indoor game, the chance of losing the first one is low, so we’ll probably break in the first one more, but if it’s an outdoor game and it’s windy and there’s a chance of losing the first one, then we might want to break in more of one and two equally.”

The Cowboys ran into this issue earlier in these playoffs when Maher started spraying extra-point kicks. Two of Maher’s of his four extra-point attempts were missed so badly that they went wide of the net behind the goal posts and into the stands.

“There was a big discussion on the sideline because we were down to our third and last K-ball that hadn’t been doctored up,” said John Fassel, the Cowboys’ special teams coordinator. “That was a first for me on the sideline (talking) about losing K-balls and potentially having to use theirs.”

Nobody wants what Koo calls “the six ball,” which in most cases has gotten no pregame attention and will feel like kicking a cannonball. “Back in the day I’ve heard stories where they give you the six ball on purpose,” Koo said.

When Bears kicker Cairo Santos came up just short on a 56-yard field goal in Week 11 against the Falcons, a kick that snapped his string of 21 consecutive makes, he told the Chicago Sun-Times that using his second-choice kicking ball was partly to blame. The ball that the Bears’ equipment staff had spent the most time preparing that day was taken out of the game minutes earlier when Atlanta’s Cordarrelle Patterson ran a kickoff back for a touchdown to set an NFL record with nine career returns. The Falcons won 27-24.

Falcons punter Bradley Pinion estimated that three people in his locker room knew the procedure for preparing kicking balls — himself, Koo and long snapper Liam McCullough.

“It makes a difference,” Pinion said. “If you get a well-broken-in ball, it will travel farther, maybe 5 yards, but that’s a huge difference.”

But Pinion said even he doesn’t know exactly what is allowed and what isn’t when the balls are prepared.

“The equipment managers know the rules way better than me,” he said. “We just kind of hope and pray they are good balls.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic;
Photos: Carmen Mandato, Cooper Neill, Bob Kupbens / Getty Images)