Kansas City Chiefs rookie punter Tommy Townsend has been rock solid this season. Expectations were high when he was brought on to replace 15-year veteran Dustin Colquitt and he hasn’t disappointed. Yet, in Week 12 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Townsend didn’t have a good game.
He recorded his second-lowest yards per punt average of his professional career. He had one punt returned, though, only for two yards. The worst thing was that he was surrendering good field position to Tom Brady when he had a chance to pin them back deep.
Chiefs ST coordinator Dave Toub didn’t hold his tongue when talking about his rookie punter on Thursday. He called this the worst game of Townsend’s career and expects him to do better moving forward.
“Tommy was off to a really, really good start,” Toub said. “He probably had — he’s coming off his worst game last week. We had four punts. They were effective punts, but not great punts. [Do] you know what I mean? They hit the ground, rolled, really good for us. But at the end of the day, a little bit better, we need better punts there. He’s coming off his worst game, I’m looking for him to bounce back this week. He had a couple of pooch punts that the angle was a wrong angle, too much of angle. It seemed like we were trying to kick it away from Antonio Brown, but we really weren’t. We were just trying to get it down there in the corner of the field. So those things we need to work on. He’ll bounce back this week and have a good week.”
On the season thus far, Townsend has 33 total punts with 17 of those landing inside of the 20-yard line. His long punt is 67 yards and According to PFF, only 27.3% of his punts have been deemed returnable. Toub doesn’t believe this has anything to do with Townsend hitting the dreaded “rookie wall.”
“I find that hard to believe with him,” Toub said. “Basically because we don’t punt that much. It’s not like we’re out there hitting a lot of punts. 2-4 punts a game, I mean, I don’t think that’s an issue really. It could happen, but I don’t think that’s something that we’d even talk about really.”
Townsend is due for a bounceback game against the Broncos in Week 13. Back in Week 7, when the Chiefs first faced Denver, Townsend had three punts totaling 133 yards. One punt was returned for no yards during that game. He won’t have the favor of working with the tin Denver air, but he will have the comfort of playing in front of a home crowd.
