DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Pure Football Forum Browns sign punter Spencer Lanning

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He also served as a kicker during his final two collegiate seasons, connecting on 34 of 44 field goal attempts and 80 of 84 PATs. A native of Rock Hill, South Carolina, the 5-11, 200-pound Lanning attended York Comprehensive High School in South Carolina.

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Oh boy...

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Browns punter Reggie Hodges is scheduled to become a free agent next month.

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Good luck with that ... boy he sucked this year!

I'm gonna run right out and buy my Superbowl tickets right now...LOL

I KNEW HASLAM DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THIS TEAM AND ONLY WANTED TO GIVE BANNER THE KEYS TO THE STORE AND NOW LOMBARDI IS GOING TO RUN THIS TEAM INTO THE GROUND SO HE CAN TALK HASLAM INTO SELLING HIM THE TEAM FOR A DOLLAR AND THEN MOVE THE TEAM TO COLOMBIA!!!

yea...

now we can cut both Dawson AND Hodges! Extra Roster spot!


Seriously though...why has no other player in NFL been able to do both? I feel as though kicking and punting are similar enough and the practice for both has to be unintensive enough that SOMEONE could do both well enough to be NFL worthy...really no one?

I like the move. This kid should have made the team last year over Hodges. He out kicked Hodges at every turn, but in the end Shurmer decided to go with experience.

Lanning is also a good place kicker. He won't displace Dawson, or any solid replacement for Dawson in a few years, but he is good enough to use in a pinch if our guy gets hurt.


Great move by the team. I hoped we would sign him again and/or he wasn't picked up by someone else.





You guys do realize Lanning was on the team last preseason don't you?



Look at his numbers, you can find them,.....it was a joke we kept Hodges over him last year.

He was in camp with the Browns last year, so it's a reasonable move. We still have the same special teams coach, so he got to work with him last year, and obviously remembers him.

I don't care if its Lanning or someone else, but Hodges is not worth keeping.

I agree.

I liked Hodges in 2011 ...... but he really lost it last year. He was good for a 30 yard punt once or twice per game last year. I don't know if he wasn't 100% over his injury, if he'll never return to his prior form, or what.

I liked Hodges better in 2011 as well. . . because he missed the entire season due to injury!



(I think you meant 2010)

Shane Lechler is a free agent. I'm not saying, I'm just saying. . .

I always thought that about the long snapper. Why have a guy that is only a long snapper?

Agreed. Those are specialty positions.

Pontbriand was money for quite some time. But when he went bad, it was bad. And sudden. Like a golfer who gets the shanks. The fact no one else picked him up is telling.

I thought that he did get picked up by another team after we cut him ....... maybe San Francisco?

Yeah, they signed him to a deal in February of last year, but he was gone before the season started.

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Pat McAfee is on The Bob and Tom show quite a bit lately, and one day he was talking about training to do both, but the mechanics are so much different that it is really hard. He did say he wanted to be the first player in the NFL to do both.

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The mechanics between driving and putting are completely different but some people still do both at an elite level... if that's your only job 24/7/365, to practice those 2 things.. it seems reasonable that a decent athlete could get to an NFL level at both.

Heck get a good soccer player and train him and he could probably punt right footed and kick FGs left footed, that way his mechanics wouldn't get confused.

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Heck get a good soccer player and train him and he could probably punt right footed and kick FGs left footed, that way his mechanics wouldn't get confused.

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reminds me of that movie 'the replacements'......"over the bar".....lol

WWho hasn't thought that before? This move looks lame.

WE'RE GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL!!!

j/c

I think everyone knows I'm pretty skeptical of the new Powers That Be.

But I also think everyone knows we seriously needed an upgrade at the punter position. And personally, I don't know enough about this kid to say it was a bad signing.

What I know at this juncture is it was in need of upgrading and they made a move to address the position. I don't see that as a bad thing.....

Actually, I think the special teams coach, who was retained probably thought that this was a good idea.

I don't think Banner/Lombardi/Chud had anything to do with it except go with the recommendation, and continue to look for another punter.

Mike Florio writes that the Browns should franchise punter Reggie Hodges.

He writes "Kicker Phil Dawson was tagged in 2011 and 2012. Using it a third time would entitle him to quarterback money. So if it’s used, it won’t be used on him. Punter Reggie Hodges is hitting the market after three years with the team. Though his performance doesn’t cry out “franchise tag,” it could be cheaper to squat on him for a year than to sign a replacement on the open market; that’s why so many punters and kickers have been tagged in recent years."

Really? That's how bad my team is??? We franchise a kicker for 2 years and then the punter?

Why would we franchise a punter who was good for a 30 yard shank or 2 per game?

I could see doing so if he were a great punter, but he sucked last year.

It's why he was laughing after the comment.



I like Lanning. We can go back and see i said so last year.


After that....draft , bite the bullet....draft Brad Wing in the 3rd....we'll get him there, but probably not at the top of the 4th.


Wing will have a 17 year NFL career as a top punter. Three, four years in people won't care he was a high pick, they'll just be glad we have him.


I'll bet after the fact most Raider fans didn't care Ray Guy was their 1st round pick.


If you only draft one every 15-20 years, why not spend a pick and get a good one?


My feeling is kickers can lose lots of games. Since they tend to play a long time, get one who doesn't lose many.



Now...the reality is even good kickers miss seemingly easy kicks, so good kickers don't lose games....teams lose games.


If we get in to the SB next year and Dawson misses a last second 35 yarder and we lose by a point, he isn't all of a sudden going to become a bad kicker in my mind.


He simply missed a kick.....a big one no doubt, but that doesn't change the opinion.


Anybody who's played sports knows that is how it is

I agree with you. I've seen a lot of teams let pretty good kickers go over a relatively small amount of money and then struggle for a couple years trying to find a reliable replacement...

I do think a good FG kicker is more valuable than a good punter, but to have each locked up and use a 3rd round pick every 12-15 years isn't a bad deal

just clicking

Here is what my strategy for 4th downs, punters, and punting would approximately look like. There is a certain amount of tie-in and there is a difference between how important a punter is for a Pat Shurmur coached team vs a Bill Belichick coached team. I'm using those 2 examples because both the quality of offense (and how that reflects %chance to convert and value of a possession) and the propensity to punt on 4th down influences how important the position is. Belichick is probably the most aggressive NFL coach on 4th downs, the most recent AFCCG notwithstanding.

Simply put, I would go for it on 4th down much more frequently than nearly all coaches do. Whenever stats or advanced models (based on info from hundreds or thousands of NFL games) are used, they invariably lead to this exact conclusion. The only way to defend the current NFL dogma is that more or less everyone is doing it that way and accustomed to it. The problem is that 4th down strategy is more or less hasn't changed in the last 50 years, while the game has changed dramatically.

Take the following scenario/gamble, you can pick A or B)

A) 3 out of 4 times your team has the ball, 1st and 10, at your own 30-35 yard line. 1 out of 4 times your opponent has the ball, 1st and 10, at your own 30 yard line.

B) 100% of the time your opponent has the ball at its own 30 yard line.

Put this way, most rational people (I think), will pick A. Yet what I'm describing is basically 4th and 1 at your own 30, and every NFL coach picks option B. 4th and 1 converts at ~74% in the NFL and a punt from your own 30 figures to net close to 40 yards.

Here's my 1-10 aggressiveness scale. 1 is always punt or kick on 4th down, 10 is never punt or kick on 4th down. Most NFL coaches fall in the 2-5 range, with Shurmur and many others being more in the 2-3 range, and coaches like Payton, Belichick, and Mike Smith being closer to 5. Chip Kelly and the AdvancedNFLStats, Football commentary, and other models are more in the 6-7 range, which is roughly NFL ideal. The 8-10 range is the domain of Madden, other video games, and the occasional high school football program, which is included for completeness only and has exactly 0 influence in any of this.

As is, NFL teams average less than 5 punts a game. As a rough estimation with more ideal/aggressive strategy, that number should probably be closer to 3 or so. That's why I say that the punter just doesn't matter much to me. If one great punter has a hang time of 4.6 and nets me 120 yards on those punts, and my 7th round/UDFA/minimum salary guy has a hang time of 4.4 and nets me 110 yards, how much of a difference is that really making?

You can bring up coffin corner kicks and other specialty situations, but then when you bring the same stats, models, and reasoning described above into situations where you would commonly see a short punt, the end result is usually that it's just better to go for it. Teams should be extremely aggressive in no man's land (especially around the opponent's 35-40 yard line), where kicking a FG sucks because you often miss and give away good field position anyway, and punting sucks on a compressed field.

In decades past, a punt deep into an opponent's territory could be a game changing play. My coffin corner play is to go for it and try to aggressively score a TD or at least a FG. It's easy to say that punting is the best play there on 4th and 5, yet willingly giving up possession for what turns into 35 yards of field position at best, and often only 15-20 yards doesn't seem so smart to me. I still think the reason otherwise smart and rational people think that way is to have watched football for so many years that it just becomes accepted as the right thing to do.

In another thread there was a discussion about loopholes in rules and how to exploit them for advantages. I personally am a gamesman through and through so those are cool situations. Just about every game/sport has those situations and football is certainly not an exception. Here's the thing though, take all of those little edges/loopholes combined, all the intentional safety situations, intentional holding, extra men on the field on D when the 5 yards don't matter but the time does, etc etc. COMBINED and they still don't add up to what coaches are giving up when they consistently make overly conservative decisions on 4th down.

That just goes back to the punter, which is (still) anticlimactic. Just get a guy who can do a respectable job. Most teams seem to be able to do that with a late round pick/UDFA and 6 figure salary. That seems about right to me. There's no reason to use an early pick and tie up a few million in cap space unless there is a guy with an extremely unique and useful skillset.

Janikowski and Lechler while at the time seemed early have proven to be solid picks. Shame the Raiders rarely hit on their main skill positions

I'd rather draft someone who can help keep our punter off the field....

I agree that Wing seems to be a special punter... but I'd be surprised if he goes higher than the 5th... unless it's a team with a late pick who doesn't have a lot of needs.

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You are about needs. I am about best players available.

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He's not all about needs, in fact he's not about needs at all. He's all about sticking with the "conventional wisdom" of what value should be placed on each round.. you never take an OG in the first, you don't a RB in the first, you never take a punter or FG kicker before the 5th... He would pass on a likely future pro-bowl OG in the first to take a shot at a tweener pass rusher because conventional wisdom says you take pass rushers at 6 but you don't take OGs...

Ultimately I think Mayock and Kiper would absolutely love his drafts because he would stick to the script and take players only where conventional wisdom says they should be taken...