Harder Than You Think

Long snapping might not be glamorous but the position most taken for granted can make or break an entire season. You'll just only notice the mistakes.

A.J. Carty is that rare long snapper that signed a letter of intent with a Power Five program. You think scholarship kickers and punters are rare? Try long snappers.

And it's not as though Carty will double as a player at another position. Chris Petersen values the little things. Call it a form of Moneyball. Carty will be a long snapper and only a long snapper for the Huskies. He will greyshirt during the 2015 season, so he won't be joining the Washington football program officially until 2016. But he will be on scholarship and he will only be a long snapper. That tells you as much about Petersen as it does about Carty.

It also means that Carty's preparation will be very different than that of other recruits will be. At the end of Carty's senior season of high school football he weighed in at 275 pounds. That would be fantastic for most high school lineman signed to play for Power Five programs. But for Carty it meant he was too big. Way too big.

There was really no rush but Carty and his trainer decided to get on the ball right away.

"I'm now at 245 (pounds)," Carty told TheDawgReport.com. "(Washington's coaches) said they wanted me to be at around 240 when I come up there. I have until I go up there but my trainer and I talked about it and we wanted to lose (the weight) pretty fast so then we can build up to 240 and learn how to maintain it. I have the workout plan they gave me and I'm also working out at another gym on top of that. It's most of the same general concepts that I'm used to, so it's not foreign to me."

Thirty pounds in just a few months is a lot to lose but the weight came right off Carty. That's not to deemphasize the amount of work it took.

But why as it so important for him to lose so much weight?

"Long snapper's more of a linebacker-type of player instead of a lineman," Carty said. "I'm basically trying to make a transition from lineman to linebacker so losing that weight was a big component of that."

There's a reason it's important for a long snapper to be a leaner type. Sure, he's got to be ready to hold his own at the line, even after snapping the ball. There are only 11 players on the coverage unit and one is the punter - a player not normally known for athleticism, physicality and tackling prowess. There are 11 players on the return squad including a dynamic skill player ready to take it back to the house.

By any measure, all things being equal, the numbers favor the return team. So the long snapper has to have the best of both worlds: Toughness at the point of attack and coverage ability. That means he's got to be literally perfect on his snaps, completely reliable in his blocking, and able to get down the field fast enough to take shorten the field and, preferably, make a tackle.

"Many people don't know but it's actually a very difficult job," Carty said with a laugh. "It's not something that anyone can do. A bunch of my friends on the football team would say, 'That's easy, I bet I can do it.' Then they go down and actually try to snap and it's the worst thing you've seen in about a year. It's very difficult. There are many aspects to it. You have to snap, block and cover. A regular coverage guy takes three steps back and runs down the field. I have to snap, make sure I get a good block, and then go downfield. It's a little bit different."

It's a lot different and the hardest part about the job is the psychological toll it takes. Not just because of the pressure. Kickers deal with that in late game situations. It's the all-the-time grind minus any personal reward that makes it tough.

Think an offensive tackle goes without glory? It's true that he's got to be perfect, or else he's noticed. But if a long snapper messes up it's not a sack. It's a turnover and very likely points for the opposition. Beyond that, he's doing a lot more on each play he sees than any offensive tackle is. More is riding on each of his plays. It's also tougher to find a rhythm when you see the field so infrequently.

"There's more pressure than people think," Carty acknowledged. "No one's really looking at you. My goal for Washington is I don't want any of the fans to know who I am. I don't want them to call my name for four years, because if they do that means I did something bad. It's difficult to be consistent. Everybody sees the bad. They don't see the good."

As coaching becomes more of a science that incorporates many human disciplines beyond simple X's and O's, college programs are incorporating more of a whole-person approach to preparing players. That means there's psychological training, however strange it might look in the moment.

Carty says there are ways to prepare a player for stressful game settings. He knows because he's experienced that training.

"My high school coach did a pretty good job of that for me and my kicker," Carty said. "My junior year was the first time both my kicker and I were playing on varsity in practice. What he'd do is line up the field goal unit and just use the snapper, the holder and the kicker out there. If we messed any part of it up, like if we missed the field goal or if there was a bad snap, the team would have to run three gassers. And they would have the team yelling at us, yelling awful things in our ears and super loud. That really got me ready.

"Then my first game of the season I played against Bishop Gorman on ESPN," he recalled with another laugh. "That was my first varsity game ever snapping. My punter was five yards deep in the end zone. During that year my coach really prepared me. There are definitely ways to prepare."

It's worked out well for Carty so well. You might not have read much about him, but from where he's sitting that's probably a good thing.