Special Teams Coordinator Byron Storer (10.22.26)
Is DK (Chimere Dike) the best return guy you’ve seen this year?
“I think he’s got to be up there for sure with the top guys. Right now, I’m blanking on his name, but the guy in Jacksonville, I would say is the other guy I was thinking about is arguably, are those two guys the best returners in the NFL right now? So, I would say DK is definitely up there.”
What is it that kind of sets him apart that he’s been able to come in over the last couple years of his career and immediately establish himself in those roles?
“Well, I think he’s got good coaching, for one thing, but I think he’s really, really smooth, and he’s got great vision, and he knows how to set up his blocking. And then when he sees a crease, he’s got enough speed and acceleration to get through that crease and then also the long speed to score. So, I mean, he is a very, very instinctual return man, and he makes it almost look easy. It doesn’t jump off the screen that he’s the fastest man on the field, but time and time again, he’s outrunning his coverage.”
Talking about Andre (Szmyt) and that whole special teams, sort of bouncing back. I mean, just in the moment after they jump offsides trying to block the kick and trying to rattle you guys.
“Yeah, that’s tough. I’ve always thought that Andre’s superpower is his ability to bounce back from missed kicks or some situation like that. I see it in practice every week. I’ll see in a situation where he’ll miss a kick and then that very next kick, he’ll come back and he’ll make it. He’s just a really, really good self-corrector. And I think he’s got incredible self-talk, too. So, I think that nobody wants to see a kick get blocked, but Andre is mentally tough enough to handle that.”
When you talk about great self-talk, do you mean, like, he just keeps himself positive when he misses something?
“Yeah, I think that he has an ability to, like, assess what he did wrong and then be able to make a, like, slight edge adjustment to be able to make the kick. He kind of is a fast learner. He’s able to adapt to any situation, or if he misses one, then he learns and he’s able to correct it so he can get it through the uprights. And you run into some people that will overcorrect, you know what I’m saying? Andre is more of a…He knows exactly what he did wrong and now he’s going to go fix it and make the kick. So, I really do feel like that’s his superpower.”
With the teams’ formula to winning these low scoring games, what is your unit’s role in helping swing the pendulum in your direction to win those games?
“We always want to dominate the field position battle, and it starts with our coverage units and our punting and kicking, and then we want to set up our offense in the return game. So, we’re out there trying to set our defense with great coverage and great punting and kicking, and then we’re trying to set up our offense with favorable field position. So, it’s really all about the field position battle for us. It’s just making sure we get our offense and defense in positions to succeed, and then we have the opportunities to score points. We take advantage of those opportunities and, hopefully, cause the turnover here and there, have a big play here and there. So, we’re really trying to play complementary football with the rest of our team.”
How great was it for you guys to be the reason that you were able to pull off that victory last week? You know, especially what happened the week before, and then Andre missing a 48-yarder, thinking that could be another bad ending to the game, just the ability to come back after that.
“I mean, I told Andre, first of all, when he came off after the first miss, I said, ‘Andre, we’re going to need you to win this game. I feel very strongly about that.’ And sure enough, it came up at the end of the game there. He had a chance to get a do-over in that same game. Very rarely does a kicker get a chance to try to make two game winners in the same game. And it’s a testament to him, it really is, that he was able to overcome the missed PAT, came out there and got our first points on the board, the first three points on the board, goes out there and tries to finish the game with, I think it was like four minutes left and ends up missing the kick, gets a second opportunity, gets it blocked, and then now he goes out there and makes it. So, I mean, that’s pretty impressive. It’s pretty impressive and I’m excited for him and the guys to go through something like that and be able to come out on top and then be able to learn from the whole situation as well.”
The guy that blocked the kick, when you have a guy like that, it looks like he got around the edge a couple times before he also blocked. What’s the adjustment on that? Do you speed up the process, or do you get a body on him?
“Well, he was offside on that one. Yeah.”
But he did get around the side.
“You’re right. You’re right. He did get close. And so, we have to rely on our alignment, making sure our alignment’s right. And also, the wing has to be able to take a flat step at the near point of number one and get as much of a piece of them to prevent him from getting to the block spot. And then also operation time. So, you have to make sure that your operation time falls below 1.3 seconds. So, it’s operation and also blocking off the edge, because you have to think about those wings have to protect the D-gap and they also have to protect the edge at the same time. So, it’s not an easy job, but it takes discipline to do it time and time again and get as much as you possibly can. Because those edge rushers now, they’re chopping your hands down, they’re dipping and driving underneath your hand. So, it’s not like they’re just going straight off the ball and just running into the block spot. They’re actively trying to avoid the blocker at the same time.”
Corey (Bojorquez) didn’t have his best day Sunday, what was going on there, or was it just kind of a bad day?
“Yeah, I mean, we didn’t think it was, he could have…He had more opportunities that he could have taken advantage of. It’s the minus, the two minus-45 kicks, where you’re like, we’ve got to have those balls inside the 20-yard line. And that’s what I told him after the game, looking at it, it’s like, ‘we’ve got to get the ball inside the 20 on those’, because if you get the ball inside the 20 on those, you’ve got four inside the 20 for the game. And you only gave up, I think it was like 7.5 yards per return, and so if you handled those punts better, you’re looking at the game completely differently. But we talked about it, and really just trying to keep the ball from going out of bounds so early, because you leave it up to the official to mark wherever he thinks it goes out. Now, I think there is some technology to it now that we learned, but he’s got to do a better job of keeping it in play. And we’ve proven now with Malachi (Corley) that we can down the punt inside the 10-yard line. So, I think we learned from that and we’ll see improvement from us.”
Tennessee obviously last week won that game, a large part because of the special teams. I asked you about DK, but what else about those groups really stand out?
“They got good players, and they got really good coaching. I think we all call him Bones (John Fassel). He’s a phenomenal special teams coordinator. I think he’s been doing it for 22 years in the NFL. I would say that they have some very good core players. Off the top of my head, guys like number 36 (Julius Chestnut), I think he got player of the week this week, right? I think he got player of the week this week for blocking the punt and also getting two tackles on special teams. And then they got another guy, Truman Jones, who’s dang good player, and then number 52. I was thinking they just got really good core special teams players that are playing at a high level. And that’s what Bones always does. He’s able to get these guys to play at a high level, play together, play with enthusiasm. So, they’re a good unit. And we’ve got a challenge ahead of us this week.”
You guys have three road games in a row. How difficult or how quick is it for a kicker to go on the road and pick up sort of what kicking is like in that stadium? Like, we always, with Browns kickers, Phil Dawson talks all the time about the Browns’ stadium used to be configured with the wind and all that being on the lake. That was his home stadium. So, I’m just guessing, just kind of looking at, hey, obviously when it’s in the dome, it’s different, but what’s that sort of process like?
“Well, I have an assistant, Kade Rannings, that he really does a great job on the weather report. And we try to understand what the wind is going to be doing on the day of the game. And then we go out there pregame, and we’ve got to be super intentional with our pregame warmup, assessing what’s the wind doing, what are the problem areas. And then we discuss it, and then we have to monitor it throughout the game, so you go back out there at halftime, make sure that some of the things that we talked about early, before the game, do they still hold true. It’s just constantly assessing, reassessing the environment, because it’s always changing.”
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