Who is Long Snapper U???

The NFL Draft just finished over the weekend. We like to think of it as a college graduation of sorts into the professional ranks. Fans of their school celebrate having the most draft picks because it gives merit that their football program is good enough to produce talented athletes that go in to play in the NFL. This is cool to have this school pride associated with the NFL Draft.

This tends to lead to media and social media to try to get everyone to debate things like what college produces the best Quarterbacks, Wide Receivers or Defensive Backs. Then the Universities themselves stake that claim in huge recruiting battles for that particular position. Who is WR U or who can say they are Cornerback U? We all yell and debate and quote tweet and have a fun time.

Well, here the Sickos Committee and we thought what about the positions that don’t frequent the highlight reels… well unless things go terribly wrong.

What school can stake a claim to the positions that don’t get as much shine?

The first thing that popped into my head was what University could stake a claim to producing the best long snappers in the NFL?

Well, first I ran into a problem. No one really tracks long snappers historically. Really, what we mean to say is that no one really tracked the many long snappers in a fancy easily sorted spreadsheet we could drill down and get this data quickly. So we began to hunt, do we painstakingly try to track and look at every single NFL roster manually? We ran into problems there too.

I went to our data cut off point of 2010 to the 2009-10 Saints Super Bowl winning roster and found their long snapper was Jason Kyle out of Arizona State.

I clicked on his name to find out he was actually listed as a Linebacker…

Well, there goes my manual searching method. Let’s hope Pro Football Reference updates this in the future and we can expand this post about the skillful art of long snapping.

We decided to go with what we could find and what we found should be good enough for now… at least.

We came across a website called LongSnap.com. They tracked all the NFL Long Snappers for the 2010-2022 NFL seasons listed at the end of the season. So that gives us a good bit of data to try to declare someone as LONG SNAPPER U! 

I called up our master of spread-sheeting, Kevin, to sort through this little bit of data, because even though it says it on my resume, I am not proficient in Excel. (Kevin also wanted to let us know he finally bit the bullet and paid for Excel so he could write a script to correct/consolidate most of the common misspellings in the poll entries and other data. He said he was so irrationally pleased with himself. Did he know I was going to type that part out here? No, but I felt you the reader needed to know this about Kevin.) Thank you again Kevin for your hard work in the spreadsheet mines. *salute emoji*

He was able to sort through the limited data and find some interesting long snapper details below to help us see if we can determine who is our…

LONG SNAPPER U!

During the review of the limited data set (Only 2010-2022), we found there were many schools that had a few long snappers in the NFL. There were a few schools with 3 different long snappers that played in the NFL in this limited time frame. Also, there were schools with 2 long snappers but they have played the most NFL seasons at the position. With this limited amount of data (only 12 years) we figured we’d need to put it up to debate.

The Committee tended to lean on more time in the NFL regardless of the amount of Long Snappers your school churned out into the NFL. We at the Committee value longevity in the long snapper position, just like we prefer longitude over latitude and longhand over shorthand. Also, shout out to the longshoreman who work on longboats and likely live near long-shores.

WHO IS LONG SNAPPER U?

In our data set and the Committee criteria of NFL longevity at long snapping, Cal led the way with 19 combined NFL Seasons and 2 different long NFL snappers. They were followed closely in 2nd by Rutgers with 18 combined NFL Seasons and 2 different NFL long snappers. Baylor came in 3rd with 3 different long snappers and a combined 17 NFL Seasons. Rounding out the Top 5, in 4th Notre Dame had 2 long snappers with a combined 15 NFL seasons and in 5thTHE Ohio State had 3 different long snappers with only a combined 13 NFL seasons since 2010.

Special mention to the FCS Long Snapper U - William & Mary. They’ve cranked out 2 different long snappers with a combined 12 NFL Seasons.

We figured this would be an ongoing debate among all of the committee members. We even ventured to look at the Top Long Snapper recruits Long Snapper Recruiting Rankings (According to Kohl’s Professional Long Snapper Camp) and would you look who has landed the top long snapper recruit? That’s right, the Cal Bears.

We also ventured to look at the NFL Long Snapper Prospects for the 2023 NFL Draft. Long Snapper 2023 NFL Draft Prospects. An eclectic bunch of schools here including UCF, Penn State and the Keydets of VMI are in the Top 3.

We know this is an extremely limited data set of long snappers, and a truly very silly premise for a substack post, so we ask you…

Who is your Long Snapper U?