“Kick it as deep and as far as you can,” he said after the Jets practiced Friday.
In a perfect world, said Mike Westhoff, the Jets’ special-teams coordinator, Folk’s kickoffs would land 7 yards deep in the end zone, the other team would decide to bring it out, and the Jets would tackle the returner behind the 15-yard line. But a touchback would be just fine, too.
Only one team in the N.F.L., Tampa Bay, allows fewer yards per kickoff return than the Jets. But what unfolds when the Jets return kickoffs, especially when Joe McKnight has returned them the last two weeks, has been stunning.
One week after returning a kickoff 107 yards for a touchdown against Baltimore, McKnight returned a third-quarter kickoff 88 yards Sunday against the New England Patriots, setting up a touchdown in a game the Jets lost, 30-21.
The Jets are the No. 1 team in the league in kickoff returns, averaging 33.4 yards, with the audacious McKnight, who was not even the Jets’ first choice for the job, averaging an astounding 45.6 yards per return, or 11 yards more than anyone else in the league.
“My thing is, ‘Guys, we’ve got to start expecting onside kicks and everything else,’ ” Coach Rex Ryan said Friday. “If we have a 45-yard average, we have to be alert for that.”
As the Jets continued preparing for their Monday night home game against the winless Miami Dolphins, Westhoff said his kickoff return unit would try to be ready for anything — line drives, bouncing kicks, perhaps even kicks angled to a corner of the end zone.
McKnight still has a green light to return pretty much any kick, as long as he is moving forward. On the 88-yard return, McKnight caught Stephen Gostkowski’s kick 8 yards deep. Westhoff said the kickoff had a 4.45-second hang time, a half-second longer than normal.
“That’s not a bad punt,” Westhoff said. “That’s a good punt, actually. Not a great punt, but a good punt.”
Even though kickoffs were moved up 5 yards to the 35-yard line before this season, McKnight has been encouraged to return virtually every kick. Antonio Cromartie, who preceded McKnight in the role before injuring his ribs, sometimes “ran it out of the bleachers,” Westhoff said.
Asked Friday if he would return a kickoff that rolled out of the end zone, McKnight smiled and said: “If it’s legal, I’d return it. I don’t know if I’d get the chance again.”
A possible solution for avoiding McKnight would be trying to kick the ball toward a corner of the end zone, but Folk said directional kickoffs are not that easy. A kickoff that lands out of bounds between the goal lines results in the receiving team taking the ball 30 yards from the spot of the kickoff — or its 35-yard line, under normal circumstances.
“You don’t want to flirt with the boundary too much,” Folk said. “I just try to get a lot of hang time every kick I get.”
As in the case of the 88-yard kickoff return, that does not deter someone like McKnight. Later in the game, Gostkowski kicked a line-drive bouncer that squirted through the end zone for a touchback, but Westhoff said he did not think Gostkowski did that on purpose.
Returning kicks, Westhoff said, is not something the Jets boil down to a science, either. In the week before the New England game, he said the kickoff-return unit practiced together for a grand total of eight minutes — only one minute last Friday.
“Westy does a great job of scheming up the kickoff return,” Ryan said. “He’s got guys who totally buy in, doing a great job of blocking and things. He’s had returners who are fearless and trust their blocking. I think that’s where it starts.”
The reserve tight end Matthew Mulligan, who replaced the injured lineman Robert Turner as part of the wedge that clears openings for the kick returner, said he has not been surprised by recent results, because, as he said, “We put enough work in.”
As for kicking away from McKnight, Mulligan said: “I think we try to be ready for everything, but I think every team has some sense of pride. By doing that, you’re kind of saying that your guys can’t cover.”
The Jets have made it clear that an opponent that is willing to cover a kickoff is willing to try to tackle someone like McKnight. As Westhoff said when talking about the perception that every kickoff would result in a touchback, “We’ve kind of broken that rule a little bit.”
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Gray clouds are starting to move back in though as the teams prepare for kickoff. And it looks like the Cougars' mood matches the weather. They came out in their all-gray uniforms after warming up in their Crimson gear. And every single player was carrying an individual Washington State flag. It looked like the League of Nations.