Stoking up the special
teams
 This is the second in a series of postcards Sports
Illustrated's Peter King will
e-mail from his annual NFL training-camp
tour.
Posted: Wed July 22,
1998
July 21: Smithfield,
R.I.
TEAM: New England
Patriots
SITE: Bryant College, a hilly campus in northwestern Rhode
Island, 45 miles southwest of
Boston.
FOOD: I had your basic American fare for lunch—lean
cheeseburger with fries, carrot sticks, celery sticks, raw
cauliflower—with Barq's root beer. Plain but
appealing. The pasta bar with marinara sauce looked
tempting; just wasn't in the mood. For dessert, I
chose a cup of lowfat vanilla yogurt, bypassing the sherbet.
I also bypassed the New England-style English-muffin bar,
and to this moment I regret not sampling the
cinnamon-raisin muffins with fresh
butter.
Dear NFL
Junkie:
When you get right down to it,
NFL training camp is about plays and practices and sweating and
four or five hours a day of watching and listening to the
sounds and sights of the game. This morning I was reminded
of that. Special teams coach
Dante
Scarnecchia, in his 16th season with the Patriots, ran as spirited a
kicking-team workout as you'll ever see, and head coach
Pete
Carroll got into the flow, too, airing out a rookie or two as the
15-minute session got into full
gear.
Special-teams work is vital in the preseason because
coaches preach that it's an equal third of the game, and
it's the area where low draft picks and free agents can
make the team. In this practice, Scarnecchia put rookies
and free agents on the wings
of the punt teams to see who could block heavy rushes, and he
put kids out at the "gunner" positions—the
wide receivers who try to beat double-team blocks downfield
to tackle the return men—to see who could get past the
vicious blocking. One rookie
playing tight end got snowed under by three rushers and caused a
punt by rookie
Mark
Gagliano to be blocked. Scarnecchia exploded. "Son," he
hollered, "are you gonna play the game?! Or are you
just gonna let them run over you!"
On another punt, gunner
Kato Serwanga
blatantly blocked special-teams ace
Larry
Whigham in the back, sending Whigham flying. Carroll erupted.
"HEY!" he shouted, walking quickly toward
Serwanga. "That ain't no kinda block we use around
here!"
After practice, on the field, I told Carroll I was
impressed with the intensity of his special-teams
work.
"Not every team does it like that," he said,
sweating in the hot late-morning sun. "I just think
you have to. It decides a lot of games."—P.K.
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