What a difference five one-hundredths of a second makes.
In the year that Detroit Lions rookie punter Jack Fox spent on the practice squads in Detroit and Kansas City, he learned a lot about the minuscule differences between punting in college and the NFL.
He learned that in the NFL, punters try to kick within 1.25 seconds of catching it. When he was at Rice, he guessed that time was closer to 1.3 or 1.4 seconds.
“It doesn’t sound like a huge difference,” Fox said Thursday in a conference call, “but it really does feel like it.