The Jets may need to find a new punter
At the end of each season we like to take an in-depth look at how the Jets’ punter(s) performed. Last year’s review was titled “Was Thomas Morstead as good as he seemed in 2023?” and the conclusion reached was basically that, yes, he was very good.
This year saw a bit of a downturn in his raw numbers and a few frustrating moments where he made mistakes, so it seems reasonable to flip that on his head and ask if he was as bad as he seemed. Should the New York Jets bring in serious competition for the 39-year old and should he consider his role under threat?
The final line of last year’s review was somewhat prophetic as it read: “Ideally, he won’t have to punt as often with Aaron Rodgers at the helm if all goes to plan.”
While it may feel like the 2024 season went anything but to plan, Morstead certainly did punt a lot less. Having led the NFL with 99 punts in 2023, he only punted 63 times last season.
In addition to his workload, Morstead’s numbers also reduced. His gross average reduced from 48.8 to 47.7 and his net reduced from 41.7 to 40.7. A gross average of 47.7 would have placed you in the top five several years ago, but the punting game is evolving over the past few years, with nine players posting an average of over 49 yards in 2023, which increased to 11 last season.
Morstead also saw a downturn in his percentage of punts landed inside the 20 (from 36 percent to 30) and an increase in total touchback percentage (from 8 percent to 11).
None of that bodes particularly well for Morstead’s performance being as good as last season, but we can still determine whether it was at an adequate standard.
Since the team had a better offense this year, it’s possible Morstead was working with shorter fields more often and therefore had less opportunities to rack up high averages.
Our own metric seeks to take into account field position and ignores the effects of penalties to assess how optimal a punter’s performance was over the course of the season.
GGN readers who’ve followed our analysis on Morstead and Braden Mann over the past few years will be familiar with this metric, which we call ANPP and is designed to measure how efficiently a punter performs when taking into account field position. (A more detailed explanation of what this statistic entails is here).
This metric provides us with a sliding scale from 60 to 70 within which virtually all punters will land over a large sample size. Anything close to 60 means your job is in danger and anything close to 70 means you’re among the league’s best.
Morstead posted an ANPP of 69 in 2023, an improvement over Mann’s 67 in the two previous seasons. In 2024, Morstead’s ANPP works out at 67. That’s still solid, on a par with Mann’s numbers here, and if the team is basing their decision on whether or not to retain him on similar data, they are likely to conclude that he’s still the guy.
Over the past few seasons, since leaving the Jets, Mann has developed into a punter that the Eagles are obviously happy with. They’ve retained him and he won a Super Bowl ring with them this year, while posting superior numbers to Morstead, albeit still outside the league’s elite.
The main remaining question here is whether the Jets should be regretting their decision to give up on Mann, who remains under contract with the Eagles on a similar contract to the one Morstead signed with the Jets.
Mann has a bright future, with several more years remaining in his career. However, it’s difficult to second-guess their decision to replace him with the steady Morstead, because Mann was extremely inconsistent during his time with the Jets (and also in a spell with the Steelers, who cut him). At the time, the Jets were expecting to be contenders with Aaron Rodgers at the helm and likely prioritized reliability over the future upside potential at this position.
The numbers on Morstead put his 2024 performance, which seemed underwhelming at the time, in perspective. The Jets shouldn’t be so hasty to move on from the veteran, who remains under contract with his cap number a reasonable $3 million.
The team should be satisfied they have someone adequate at this decision and the decision for who might be a long-term punting solution is one that they can afford to punt to next season.