Ross Els Talks Michigan State Special Teams Scouting Style

Ross Els is the new Michigan State Spartan football special teams coordinator, explain his thoughts on scouting opponents and statistics.

East Lansing, MI— Ross Els is in charge of running the Michigan State special teams for Mel Tucker and Spartan football. He talked about scouting opponents and how stats don't always tell the real story.

"I think you've got to be careful when you look at punt return stats. The most important thing about a punt return is getting the ball back to the offense and not creating something stupid. When I hear of some programs are great punt returns, and all that or they block all these punts, but they had three roughing the punter penalties. I'm not saying one philosophy is better than the other, I'm just hearing some negativity toward Michigan State, and I have not watched any of their film, so I don't know what they have done well, or they haven't, that's not my job. I can tell you this though, without saying exactly how we're going to do things, is we will be aggressive. We will be aggressive in return games; we'll be aggressive in coverage games. What you do, you asked specifically about punt returns, what you decide to do, to me, is dictated by the opponent. If they're a bad protection team, we'll come after them. If they're a bad coverage team, we probably won't. If they're very sound, we'll mix it up. It just depends with the opponent gives you. We'll have the opportunity; our kids will have the opportunity to do both. Set up returns, go after punts, it just depends on what the opponent gives us and how good we are at holding people up, how good are we at returning, how good are we at bursting off the line of scrimmage, how good are we at blocking punts. It's going to be a while before I know the answers of us, and then we can go to the opponent and find out what they do poorly."

The Spartans kick off the season on September 5, 2020. They will be hosting in the Northwestern Wildcats with a rare, season-opening Big Ten game.

Tell us what you think Ross Els's thoughts on how to scheme special teams for Mel Tucker and Michigan State in the comment section below.

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