Pete Lembo reveals whether teams will copy New England Patriots field goal block

Every now and then something will happen in football that appears truly innovative, whether it’s a new formation or a new wrinkle in how to do an otherwise mundane task. A New England Patriots field goal block over the weekend had a little of both.

The Patriots blocked a kick against the Miami Dolphins on Sunday night when they lined a sprinter up far outside the hashes, then had him sprint down the line, anticipating the snap count perfectly.

As the ball was snapped, Brenden Schooler was already slipping back behind the line, ready to time his block perfectly. It worked swimmingly.

“Yeah, I had a few people send that to me,” South Carolina special teams coordinator Pete Lembo said. “I thought it was really cool. And certainly they had studied that well and had some kind of indicator.”

When the New England Patriots field goal block happen, the immediate thought from those broadcasting the game and thousands around the globe was: How do we replicate it?

That might be trickier than it sounds.

For one, Miami didn’t play the field goal block all that well. The wing on the outside reacted to the inside, allowing Schooler to shoot in behind for the block. That wouldn’t always be the rule for the kicking team.

“The truth is in field goal protection, and not everybody’s identical, but most of us approach that like you protect the same way no matter what the look is,” Lembo explained. “So theoretically if that wing is supposed to be double punching or whatever they’re teaching he should do that no matter what, whether there’s a guy there or not. I don’t know if they saw something on film that he was going to put his eyes inside or rotate or if they had an indicator on the snap, but I thought it was really cool that they pulled it off.”

The other factor in the field goal block is you really have to have some kind of ‘indicator’ as Lembo puts it of when the snap is coming. Otherwise your player sprinting from the outside is liable to be offside or mistime the jump altogether.

Whether that indicator is the kick coming right before time expires or something the kicking team is doing, you need to be reasonably sure you’ve got it timed up right.

But while the New England Patriots field goal block might be hard to replicate, that probably won’t stop others from trying.

“That’s the beauty of football, right?” Lembo said. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all you see something new and somebody pushing the envelope, so I thought that was really cool.”