Back in the day, when I used to play high school football, our coach called our special teams the “Oh My God, Special Teams” unit. Actually, the words he used were a little more colorful, but since this is a PG-rated blog, I am choosing to alter his phrasing a little bit.
The reason we were called the “Oh My God, Special Teams” was because of our propensity for allowing kickoffs and punts to be returned for touchdowns, as well as for the general mayhem we always managed to cause in that particular phase of the game.
I remember once getting ready to cover a kickoff during a game against Bellaire (when the high school enrollments in the Ohio Valley were much larger than they are today and college prospects more plentiful) and looking downfield at the guy standing deep about to catch the ball and realizing he was much bigger than any player we had out there about to tackle him.