Catching Up on the Main Points From Rams' Chase Blackburn

Let's sum up what Rams' special teams coordinator Chase Blackburn had to say after OTA's on Tuesday.

For the most part, Blackburn touched on several members of his special teams unit and he voiced opinions over the NFL rulebook regarding kickoffs.

Despite a solid year by Xavier Smith, Blackburn spoke about the Rams' acquisition of Britain Covey.

“I think anytime, again, you bring in competition, it's going to help bring clarity to the situation a little bit of like, ‘Hey, what do I need to do? What can I improve? How do I need to win this job?’ And when you see another guy competing, you're naturally going to rise. The stars rise to the top, so that's what I look at.”

Blackburn then went into his goals for the season, goals consisting of being better as a group, not giving up blocked kicks, and improving protection for the punters and kickers. Blackburn also mentioned adding competition helps make the special teams unit special, perhaps alluding to Covey's signing.

Blackburn then went into Ethan Evans, a man who has been booming punts during OTAs.

“We've continued with that, with some other types of kicks and different things that we can do and utilize some of his leg strength and different areas of the field and try to be more not showing and giving away our punt direction, but being able to utilize some things that'll allow us to kind of disguise and flip a field in a different way.”

Blackburn also mentioned he was happy with kicker Joshua Karty and that their goal in 2025 is to improve consistency, mentioning potential kickoff strategies such as bouncing the ball.

Blackburn then spoke about the kickoff rules that began last season.

“There was probably less of the on the ground ball than I expected, and when people did kick it on the ground, they were successful, when we did it on the ground, we were successful, but there's a risk reward inherently with that about being able to control that ball and being short or kicking out of bounds, and so you got to weigh those based upon game situations and different things and where is our offensive, defense, how we're playing, what's the score of the game, weather, obviously we play indoors, but those outdoor games playing in Philly in the snow, you're not really going to try to take some of those risks in those situations."

"Where I think there wasn't probably quite as many explosives, but if you look as the season as it progressed, I feel like just going back and going through it over and over again is early in the year, teams were trying to figure out both sides of it and it was kind of more vanilla schemes. Then you started getting some of the power and pull schemes and some inside zones and some more offensive style plays and kick return group started picking up and having a little more success. I think we hit our stride as the back half of the year progressed and having (WR) Jordan ‘J Whitt’ (Whittington) back there and (WR) Xavier (Smith) and (RB) Blake Corum and the number of guys we use back there for different skill sets and different return styles, we can use that stuff to our advantage and I think more teams found that out as the season progressed.”

Blackburn finished off with a little more strategy, including the use of analytics, stating that analytics were a good starting point for him to look at different situations.

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