Freakonomics Radio - Why Does the Most Monotonous Job in the World Pay $1 Million? (Ep. 493 Update)

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Adam Smith famously argued that specialization is the key to prosperity. In the N.F.L., the long snapper is proof of that argument. Here’s everything there is to know about a job that didn’t used to exist.

Hey there, it's Stephen Dupner. If you watched this past Sunday Super Bowl, in which the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles by kicking a field goal with just a few seconds left, you may have noticed a few things. You may have noticed that Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is just an absurdly good and clutch performer, even when he's hurt. You may have noticed the controversial holding penalty on the Eagles' defense that gave the Chiefs a chance to run out the clock before

Harrison Butker kicked that winning field goal. One thing you almost certainly didn't notice was the man who snapped the ball on that winning kick. His name, by the way, is James Winchester. He is the Chiefs' long snapper. And you're not supposed to notice him, because we only notice the long snapper when something goes wrong, as it did in last year's Super Bowl. Last year, just before that Super Bowl, we published an episode about the profession of the long snapper. Now we've gone back and updated that episode, and it includes an interview with the allegedly guilty long snapper, to set the record straight. So you're about to hear an updated version of our episode called, Why Does the Most Monotonous Job in the World Pay $1 Million? Hope you enjoy.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. Our story today is about specialization in the labor market. Exciting, right? It is about one nearly invisible job inside a highly visible profession. Let's start by asking, what is specialization exactly? Specialization is one of the things that makes us rich. That's Victor Matheson.

I'm a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross. I specialize in all things sports economics. What does Matheson mean when he says that specialization makes us rich? This goes all the way back to Adam Smith. Adam Smith said that specialization is the royal road to prosperity because if people specialize, they can really get good at something. Adam Smith's famous example was about pin making, you know, like straight pins that you put in a shirt. And he said, look,

10 people in a factory making pins, not very exciting job, but if they can each specialize on 10 different aspects of how you make a pin, a group of 10 workers in a factory in one day could make 48,000 pins. That means 4,800 pins per worker. While each of these individual workers, if they had to make these pins on their own, they'd be lucky to make maybe 20. Victor Matheson has his own favorite example of specialization. I think back to the books and the TV series that were on when I was a kid, Little House on the Prairie and Paw Angles. Everyone was in love with Paw Angles because you're like, oh, this guy can do everything.

Is there anything that Paw can't do? And it turns out Paw could do a lot of things, but he couldn't do anything well. And his family was in poverty essentially their whole life, living at the edge of existence. You know, we talk about the term, this guy's a jack of all trades, but the reality is being a jack of all trades kind of means you're a jackass of all trades. That's right. Victor Matheson just called the beloved Pa Ingalls a jackass, but he's an economist. What do you expect? Here's how Matheson describes his own work. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources across competing uses, and sports economics focuses

on anything where we use this in the sports world. And of course, that can apply in specialty positions like the long snapper. The long snapper. Do you know what a long snapper is? Even if you are a football fan, you may not. And if you aren't a football fan, then no. You have heard of the quarterback, maybe the wide receiver and linebacker, but the long snapper? No, that is not a thing that people care about. Today, we're going to make you care. We'll begin with Rich McKay. MC, capital K-A-Y. I am the president and CEO of the Atlanta Falcons. McKay has been around football his whole life. His father, John, was a legendary coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL,

and before that, at the University of Southern California, where he won four national titles. So if you look at the history of long snappers, when my dad coached at USC and first got into the pros, the long snappers were backup guards. That's who they were. And they weren't great at snapping. and first got into the pros, the long snappers were backup guards. That's who they were. And they weren't great at snapping. And many a game was won and lost by a snap going the wrong direction. Okay, let's unpack what McKay just said on the off chance that you, dear listener, are not an aficionado of what we Americans call football and what the rest of the world calls

American football, since to them, football is what we call soccer. And honestly, football is a better name for soccer, since in soccer, you do mostly kick the ball, whereas in American football, you mostly don't kick the ball. You mostly throw it or run with it. But here's the twist. The story we are telling today does concern the rare occasions in American football where the ball gets kicked. Got it? All right. Here's how American football works. Each team has 11 guys on the field at a time.

The team with the ball is on offense, and those players include a quarterback, receivers, and running back, and a bunch of very large men, including the guards that Rich McKay mentioned, whose primary job is to block the defensive players. Another of these large men is called the center. He's the guy who crouches over the ball on every play and snaps it between his legs to the quarterback. Spoiler alert. The center, even though he snaps the ball on every offensive play, he is not the long snapper. Okay, just store that away. The mission of the offense is to run and pass the ball down the field and get it into the opponent's end zone. That's a touchdown.

But the team that's on defense is, of course, trying to prevent that. The offense and defense are essentially like two opposing armies in the old days. American football is very warlike with much brighter colors and somewhat fewer casualties. Also, cheerleaders. Anyway, the offense has four plays or downs to advance the ball 10 yards. They get a new first down every time they do that, but if they face a fourth down, they have to make a decision. They can run one more play in the hopes they get past that 10-yard mark, but if they fail, then they surrender the ball to the other team on that spot, and the other team brings out their offense. What usually happens on fourth down is the offense will choose

to kick the ball. There are two types of kicks. If you're a long way from your opponent's end zone, you will likely punt the ball to the other team. A punt is a capitulation. It means the defense has stopped your offense. This means bringing on a specialist called a punter who kicks the ball very high and very far, 45 or 50 yards down the field to the other team's punt returner. But if you've got a fourth down closer to your opponent's end zone, you may try to kick a field goal. That means bringing on a different specialist. This one is not a punter. He's a place kicker. And the place kicker tries to kick the ball through the big yellow uprights at the back of the end zone. A field goal counts for three points. Not as good as a touchdown, which is six points, but still very valuable.

You'll also usually see the place kicker after a team scores a touchdown, kicking what's called an extra point or a PAT, point after touchdown, which counts for one point. Okay, we got that? The unit that executes these kicking plays is neither an offensive nor a defensive team. They are called special teams, of which the punter or place kicker are most critical. Rich McKay again. If we were doing this podcast 15 years ago, you would have said to me, hey, who are the specialists on the team? And I would have said to you, the punter and the kicker. And you would have said, oh yeah, there's two of them. And then today, if you say to me, who is a specialist on the team? I say the punter, the kicker,

and the snapper. The long snapper, that is. Unlike Pa Ingles, the long snapper does just one thing. He doesn't throw the ball. He doesn't run the ball. He doesn't kick the ball. He doesn't play offense or defense. He doesn't even snap the ball on regular offensive plays. All he does is snap the ball on punts, field goals, and extra points. On a punt, he snaps it directly to the punter, who stands about 15 yards behind the long snapper. The punter catches the ball around chest high and kicks it downfield. The long snapper does now have a chance to run downfield and try to tackle the punt returner, but since there are other players on special teams who are much better at running and tackling, this rarely happens. On a field goal or extra point attempt, meanwhile, the long snapper snaps the ball to the holder, who's usually a punter or a

backup quarterback. The holder is down low, one knee on the ground, about eight yards behind the snapper. He deftly catches the snap and places the ball on the ground at a slight angle for the kicker to kick, the laces facing away from the kicker to minimize spin. So the long snapper will be on the field for maybe just eight plays a game out of an average of nearly 80 total plays run by his team. And here's the thing. An NFL team is only allowed to have 48 players on its game day roster. And yet, every NFL team uses one of those valuable roster spots for a long snapper. Is that really necessary? Is the task so difficult, the position so specialized, that it's worth a roster spot for just that handful of plays?

Let's do the numbers. Victor Matheson again. You've got 22 starters, 11 on offense, 11 on defense. You can have an entire backup crew on offense and defense, and that gets you to 44. Add a hunter and a kicker, that gets you 46. Is having a third string right tackle or seventh wide receiver worth more or less than having a guy you can count on getting that snap perfect

every time. And what we've seen is pretty much every team says, yeah, the marginal value of that one play always doing well is worth that few times a game I wish I had some sort of replacement on the defensive line. And Rich McKay again. The downside is so high if you don't do it accurately that you're going to invest a player position in that. And we've done it as a league for at least 15 years. Okay, let's consider the downside of not having a dedicated long snapper. What happens, for instance, when your long snapper gets hurt during a game?

Now, this doesn't happen often, even though football does produce a lot of injuries, the long snapper is by nature a low-risk position. Still, it does happen. Let's go back to 2008. A showdown in Pittsburgh. The the third quarter of this game, the Steelers had to punt the ball away to the Giants. The announcer Dick Stockton noticed something had happened on that punt play. Greg the long snapper Greg Warren is shaken up.

Greg Warren, the Steelers' long snapper, tore his ACL while running downfield to pursue the punt returner, and he wouldn't be back. Midway through the fourth quarter, the Steelers were deep in their own territory, and they had to punt again. With their regular long snapper out, they turned to James Harrison,

one of the team's best players, but a linebacker, trained not in long snapping, but in chasing and tackling offensive players. How did Harrison do? James Harrison, the new long snapper, snaps it out of the end zone for a safety. And the Giants have tied the score at 14 as Greg Warren was carted off. Harrison had produced what's called a botched snap. The ball went clear over the punter's head. And the Steelers went on to lose 21-14. When people talked about this game coming in,

do you think anyone talked about a long snapper injured and then the backup long snapper snapping it over the head of the punter for a safety? I don't think that came into the analysis before the game started. Yeah, I don't think it did. I don't think it did. For any coach tempted to use that final roster spot on another offensive or defensive player, this was the sort of nightmare confirmation of the long snapper's value. But as Rich McKay was saying earlier, it didn't used to be this way. Sometimes they were centers, but they were usually guards.

They had to be big guys and they weren't great at snapping. Then all of a sudden, somehow the tight end got in. The tight end is a hybrid position on the offense, big enough to block the defense, but athletic enough to catch some passes. They were viewed as being better athletes, viewed as having better hands. They could throw it back faster because all of a sudden, these special teams coaches were back. They're actually timing snaps. Nobody timed snaps in the 60s and 70s. All of a sudden, they were timing snaps in the 80s. The reason coaches started timing the snaps is that they wanted to get the ball back to the kicker as fast as possible to minimize the chance of a kick being blocked.

Because as soon as the long snapper snaps the ball, the defense is trying to bulldoze the kicking team's big guys and block the kick. That is a very costly outcome for the kicking team's big guys and block the kick. That is a very costly outcome for the kicking team. So the speed of the snap matters. But as Rich McKay was saying, size was also important. We had a couple of teams that what they were doing was they were actually putting two players and angling them. Okay. So two players angled at the long snapper. So picture this, you are the long snapper bent over the ball, about to snap it between your legs to the kicker while knowing that not one, but two very large defensive players were about to crush you. That long snapper was

getting viced. And when he got viced, he got hit and absolutely, I don't know if you're allowed to say this on the radio, can you say ass over teacup? Anything. He was ass over teacup, and then they tried to run right up the middle and try to block it. As soon as you looked at it, you said, that's not right. Rich McKay is not just president and CEO of the Atlanta Falcons. He has also been on the NFL's competition committee for nearly three decades, most of that time as its chairman. One role of this committee is to propose rule changes to improve the game, to make it more entertaining for fans, but also safer for players. Yep, we start with player health and safety. And I don't say it in a way to make you guys feel better or think that that's a good tagline or anything else.

That's just the truth. In recent years, the competition committee has adjusted a lot of rules, most of them having to do with how a defensive player can hit an offensive player. You can no longer clothesline a player or use what's called a horse collar tackle. Hitting above the neck is generally discouraged. Quarterbacks are particularly well protected. So are wide receivers, as they are often in what is called a defenseless position right after they've caught the ball. For years, the NFL overlooked or played down the danger of concussions. McKay insists they are working hard now to improve player safety, especially with technologies like the tracking chips implanted

in players' shoulder pads. We get data all the time. We know where the injuries are coming from. We know the types of plays. We have the engineers that are looking at load and capacity and the impact. And what about those long snappers getting viced, as McKay put it? Well, that too wound up being addressed by the competition committee. In 2006, a new rule required that on field goals and extra points, the defensive players couldn't line up directly across from the long snapper, but had to line up outside his shoulder pads. This allowed the snapper a split second to get upright after snapping the ball and to keep himself from going ass over teacup. All of a sudden, we began to find teams that were going after the snapper on punts.

And so we said, okay, let's extend this to the snappers on punts too. This rule took hold in 2010. Now the long snapper was protected on punts and kicks, at least to some degree. So now we've got them lined up where they're supposed to be, but then their first step was to go for the head. You know, these are people trying to make a difference. We said, no, no, no, this is a defenseless player. So that prompted another rule change in 2013, further protecting the long snapper by deeming him a defenseless player in the immediate aftermath of the snap. As with many rule changes, and this is something you often see with government policy,

there were some unintended effects. I don't think we designed it where, and I know we didn't because I was in the room, we didn't design it. We said, okay, you know what? This will make the snapper 225 pounds and there'll be better cover guys. That was never the intent. That has been one of the outcomes. What McKay is describing here is a shift in body type for the long snapper position. No longer at risk of getting run over by defensive linemen, the long snapper didn't need to be gigantic. 225 pounds isn't small, but the average lineman in the NFL weighs more than 300 pounds. And when McKay says a smaller long snapper will be a better cover guy, that means he's more athletic and able to run downfield faster on a punt to try to tackle

the other team's punt returner. A 300-pounder can't do that. Coming up after the break, we'll hear from a long snapper who got into the league before the rule changes. I was a bigger snapper. I mean, I played at 275 my first few years in the league. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

Okay, it's time we hear from an actual long snapper. Yeah, so my name is Louis-Philippe Ladousseur. Ladousseur is a Montreal native who recently retired after long snapping 16 seasons for the Dallas Cowboys. But even a Cowboys fan will not know him by that name. It was Lou. It was Louie. It was LP. Captain Lou. But yeah, LP was usually the one. And I would never even get a last name. It was just LP. And how was your last name pronounced when it was pronounced? So when I went to school at Berkeley, there was a high school coach at a neighboring school. He had the exact same L-A-D-O-U-C-U-R, and he said, you know, Bob Lattiser. So I'm going to do L-P Lattiser. So you are, in one sense, Louis-Philippe Lattiser from Montreal, and in the other sense, you're L-P Lattiser from Fort Worth.

Same person, though. Yeah, same guy. Just want to make clear in case anybody's trying to track you down for unpaid parking tickets. So as Louis Philippe was saying, he was on the big side for a long snapper, around 275 pounds. His first NFL season was 2005, before the rule changes that protected the long snapper.

My first few years in the league, most of the time I would just get crushed and there's nothing you can do. So he appreciated the new rules. Because you're not getting whiplash and guys just bulldozing you. And so that helped. But then by doing that, you invited some snappers that weren't as big, that couldn't block as well, to come into this league as well. Rich McKay again. All of a sudden our rule changes came and here come a bunch of different players.

But it wasn't just the body types that were different. As the modern game sped up, the demands of the long snapper job were also evolving. Now they've got to throw the ball back there. They've got to throw it faster. They've got to be more accurate because the guys are coming off the edge fast and they got to be able to cover on the punt. And so there is a little more to the position than just throwing it back there. In other words, the job was becoming more specialized, less Pa Ingalls, jackass of all trades, and more Adam Smith, pin factory worker. And the specialization of the long snapper job led to further specialization in the form of the long snapper

agent. Yeah, I think the niche of representing long snappers kind of found me. It's Kevin Gold. I am an attorney and also an NFL agent, or what they call a certified contract advisor. I've done over 100 contracts for about 30 different guys, the vast majority of which are long snappers. As Gold said, this specialty found him. When I came out of law school, I wanted to be an NFL agent. Now I'm in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and there happened to be a player at a small Division II school called Shippensburg University. And he had this unique skill, which is he could snap the ball to the punter very fast, and he could snap it to the holder on field goals and extra points with perfect laces so the kicker

could do their job. So he became my first client. And honestly, I didn't know much about the position. I didn't even know that NFL teams really use guys just to do this role. Not only had NFL teams started using guys just for that role, but occasionally they would spend one of their valuable college draft picks to select a player who wasn't a quarterback or a linebacker, but a long snapper. Patrick Manley was one of the first pure snappers to be drafted just to snap by the Bears back in the late 90s. Patrick Manley played 16 seasons for the Bears without a single botched snap. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to prove that you understand the art of the long snap, just intone those two words, Patrick Manley. The award for the best collegiate long snapper is called the Patrick Manley Award.

There is no award for best NFL long snapper, at least not yet. Following Patrick Manley's success in the NFL, it is now common for one or two teams each year to use a draft pick on a long snapper. Kevin Gold says NFL teams have fully bought in to the value of the position. Games got to be so close and often decided by an extra point or three points that teams decided if I have one guy and this is their sole job and if they could do it 100% accurately, I'm going to dedicate a roster spot. So you're talking about a player who's going to play eight to 10 plays a game, but you're buying peace of mind. And there was one more consequence of the specialization of the long snapper position. The entire kicking game is just so much better today

than we've seen in the past. That again is the economist Victor Matheson. Today, about 80 to 85 percent of field goals are made. That's way up from the old days when you just took anyone you wanted off the roster and made them a long snapper. That's in part because of specialization of the kicker himself. But it's also the fact that the entire kicking game is much more practiced and much more efficient now. Now, you may be thinking, Victor Matheson is a bright guy for sure, but he's also a sports economist. I'm not 100% convinced he's right. I'd like to hear from someone closer to the game. I have a question that's a little out of left field. At a 2021 press conference, the Boston Globe football reporter Ben Volan had a question for Bill

Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots. Is long snapping that difficult that you need to use a roster on one player who does only that? Can't you just cross-train a few guys to do long snapping and they have more flexibility with that roster spot? Belichick is widely considered the best coach in NFL history, as well as an historian of the game. He is also famous for hating press conferences. He will dismiss a particularly ill-informed question with a grunt, a scowl, or maybe one syllable. But in this case, the question of whether a long snapper is worth a roster spot, Belichick spoke for nearly 10 minutes.

It's an interesting conversation and one that's really traveled that long and winding road from when I came into the league. And that whole unit has really evolved into a specified snapper, a specified kicker, a specific punter, and generally the punter as the holder so the three of those guys could work together all practice because they're all available. Belichick also happens to have graduated from Wesleyan with an economics degree. What he's describing here is what an economist might think of as a positive externality of specialization. In this case, each specialized player in the kicking game can make the others better because they have more opportunity to practice together.

Going back to when I first came into the league, you worked on field goals and it was maybe five minutes because that was the only time the starting center and backup quarterback were available to practice that. And the accuracy of the place kickers, which has gone up dramatically, part of that's the surface, part of that's not kicking outdoors. Part of it is the operation between the snapper, the holder, and the kicker. If you go back and you see balls rolling back and the holder coming out of a stance to catch the ball and the kind of things you see, you know, at times in a high school game, there's just a much higher level of skill, which there should be in the National Football League. So it's a really good question, and it's a good answer by Coach Belichick. That, again, is Rich McKay.

Go back and forget the snapper for a second. The kicker became specialized first, then the punter. Remember that the punter in the 50s was not a punter. He played another position, always. You would have many a game where there would be three or four really bad punts. And the reason was that player was actually playing in the game, got beat up a little bit, hadn't practiced all week doing it, and all of a sudden has got to make something happen.

So kickers first, punters second, snappers third. And special teams got better every time one of those became specialized because Coach Belichick did nail it on the head. That little trio is over there. I'm not sure who those guys are because they're always hanging out together. It's snap, hold, kick, and they practice it every day. And that's why you don't see the errors in it very often. It's immensely important. And that is Reed Ferguson, the current long snapper for the Buffalo Bills. The fact that we can basically spend, you know, I'll take just a

normal Thursday practice, for example, we're out there for an hour and a half, two hours of practice basically together for the whole time, either warming up and practicing for a field goal period or a punt period, or we're on the side talking through how the period went, things we can work on. It's just a constant, never-ending form of self-improvement, if you will. I mean, it's thousands of hours of practice is really what it comes down to. Do you feel underappreciated considering how hard it is to be that consistently good? When you accept this lifestyle and this position, you have to fall in love with the monotony of the job. You have to. You have to fall in love with chasing that perfect snap. With the monotony of the job, you have to accept the long snapper lifestyle. Who knew it was a lifestyle? At the very least, the job does require a certain humility. No one knows his name.

No one wants to know his name. No one should know his name except for his girlfriend and his mom and dad. That's Chris Rubio. They just want to get that job done. And that's what the coaches want. They just want basically a Honda Accord. It's not the flashiest, but you know what? That damn thing is going to go for 300,000 miles and it's going to keep on running forever. Chris Rubio is a, well, it's hard to describe. I'm kind of like a private football coach. But a private coach who coaches only long snappers. Not in the NFL or even in college. I would say I'm kind of like the middleman. If you were to render the long snapper industrial complex as a supply and demand chart,

Chris Rubio would indeed be right in the middle of it. Here's how he explains his job to a stranger. I'll say, okay, do you know anything about football? You know the guy that kicks the ball or punts the ball? And they'll go, yeah, yeah, I know that guy, the kicker, the punter. I teach the guys who snap the ball to those people. So you probably don't know anyone that I know. And all you've ever seen of a long snapper, that's people that I teach, is their butt.

And if you hear their name, they're doing terrible. Rubio was himself a long snapper in college at UCLA. Like many people who play the position, he didn't set out to do so. I get to high school and a coach goes, all right, Rubio, what position do you want to play? This was in California in the early 1990s. And I'm super naive and I go, quarterback, obviously. And he looks at, you know, six foot 250 pounds. And this is not, you know, six foot, 250 pounds. And this is not a good looking 250 pounds at this point.

Because Rubio, you'll never touch the football again. But it turned out that Rubio, while not quarterback material, was very good at long snapping, a position that's sometimes called upside down quarterback. back because you have to throw the ball fast and accurately backwards in a perfect spiral while hanging, crouched over the ball, head down, butt in the air. Rubio long snapped through most of high school and for three seasons at UCLA where he never botched a snap. I had been doing really well and I go up to Terry Donahue. He's chewing his little dentine gum and he's got his Ray-Bans on. I said, coach. And he kind of looks at me. Yes, Rubio. I said, coach Donahue, I don't know how I'm doing.

You don't ever talk to me. And he takes off his Ray-Bans, stops chewing his gum. He goes, Rubio, if the head coach never speaks to the long snapper, the long snapper is doing perfect. And we literally never spoke again until I graduated. And were you okay with that? Hell yeah. As long as I know what the criteria is, I'm fine with that. Rubio hoped to long snap in the NFL, but it didn't work out.

Yes. I had a couple of teams looking at me, but in between my junior and senior year, I damaged my back pretty darn well. Rubio played before the rule changes in both the NFL and college football that were put in place to protect the long snapper, which meant he was routinely getting viced. They would literally just get the biggest, angriest, meanest human being on the defense and they would line up and just destroy you before you even get your head up. Rubio earns his living these days with a company called Rubio Long Snapping. He is essentially the master of a long snapping network. He maintains this network by conducting training camps for long snappers and

would-be long snappers. I've been in Florida, the state of Washington, California, Texas, and North Carolina, and Georgia, then Illinois, two big Vegas events. And then long snappers come to me. I instruct them. I rank them. I give them a personal player profile on the website, YouTube videos, all that good stuff. And then the coaches use my rankings for recruiting. So an Alabama coach or UCLA coach, they'll contact me, Rubio. I need another kid. Here's what I'm looking for. They have to trust me and I have to be able to be trusted. Rubio estimates he has trained more than a thousand

long snappers who went on to play in college, some of whom also went to the NFL. College coaches want a good long snapper, but they also don't want to spend much time finding one. And they may not know much about long snapping anyways. So they're happy to rely on Rubio's rankings. So what does Rubio look for in a long snapper? Number one, a big head. I'm talking physically. The larger a human being's head, the better long snapper they're going to be. Second, the bigger the butt, a better long snapper they're going to be. That has to do with power. Longer arms, that'll help. And fourth, and usually the most crucial part, the dumber a long snapper, the better.

Because why? Because the smarter long snappers overthink everything. And it's not hard. We're bending over, throwing a dead animal really fast backwards. So when they're in the middle of a pressure-filled situation, it's just muscle memory. It's simple. Describe one of your training camps. Just so I understand, it's only long snapping going on. There's no other football happening.

God, no, I don't have that much time. Are you kidding? I barely can cut down what I'm talking about to the five hours. But if I'm a stranger and I just wander into this long snapping camp. You'd be so confused because you see 50 kids all bent over snapping. Even if you knew football, you'd be like, there's no way this dude's running a long snapping camp. And if you didn't know football, you'd be like, what the hell's happening here? These are high school players you're working with, correct?

It actually started as high school. And now more and more and more, I'm starting to get middle school and even elementary school kids. Get out of here. It's actually pretty smart because it's one of those weird positions that you can work on and not be a giant or physically massive or strong. What I always say is if I can get these kids pre-puberty and I can get their form down, because that's the most important thing with snapping is their form. If I can get that down and then puberty comes, it's basically just dropping an engine into the car. And then it's like, oh my gosh, I've got this fantastic form. And now look at, I've got a V12 engine. I always tell high school students, learn to long snap because number one, it could get you a college scholarship. That again is Kevin Gold, the agent who represents

NFL long snappers. Because Alabama and LSU will give scholarships to long snappers. And if you can snap two, three, four years in college at a top level, then you have a good chance to either be drafted by the NFL or get a shot after the draft through what we call an undrafted free agent. The trajectory Gold just described is the precise trajectory followed by someone we met earlier. Reed Ferguson, long snapper for the Buffalo Bills. Coming up after the break, we get to know Reed Ferguson. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio.

We'll be right back. When Reed Ferguson was in high school in Georgia, he attended several of Chris Rubio's long snapping camps. Yeah. So he ran Alabama, LSU, Tennessee, Oregon, and maybe a handful of others. He really started the process of training guys and planting them at colleges and having coaches actually reach out. He was the guy who special teams coaches in the NCAA called to recruit a snapper. Hey, I'm looking for a big guy. Hey, I'm looking for a

smaller, faster guy. And he said, okay, well, this guy is four-star snapper. This guy's a three-star snapper. He's way more athletic, but he's not as good as snapper. Reed Ferguson was a five-star snapper in Chris Rubio's rating system. Here's the letter that Rubio wrote to college coaches on Ferguson's behalf before his senior season in high school. One of the most dominant long snappers I've ever had with me. He has exceptional form and his body is perfect for Division I long snapping and beyond. Moves well and he is thick. When he snaps, people notice.

Terrific work ethic. Reed Ferguson wound up going to LSU, Louisiana State University, one of the top teams in college football. By then, his younger brother Blake was also snapping in Chris Rubio's camps. My brother started when he was in seventh grade. And a few years later, when Reed Ferguson was done at LSU and was trying to catch on with an NFL team, Blake Ferguson replaced his brother as the long snapper at LSU. Was it a scholarship for you or your brother? Yes, both of us. Full ride?

Yes. For a long snapper? Yes, sir. Blake Ferguson also made it to the NFL as a 2020 draft pick by the Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins play in the AFC East division of the NFL, same as the Buffalo Bills. So 50% of the long snappers in the AFC East are Fergusons who trained with Chris Rubio and graduated from LSU on a full scholarship. You can see why young football players, and especially their parents, would be willing to travel to and pay for Chris Rubio's long snapping camps, not just for the instruction, but for the chance to be promoted by an expert with top tier connections to the college and professional long snapping network. This network, by the way, happens to be overwhelmingly white. Around 60% of the NFL's

players are black. Black long snappers, however, are practically non-existent. Chris Rubio again. I have a couple black long snappers. I don't know why there aren't more. I really don't. It just seems to be one of those positions. I have no idea why. And Rich McKay of the Atlanta Falcons. No, it's a good question. And I wouldn't have known that until you said that. I couldn't even venture a reason. And here again is the long snapper agent, Kevin Gold. The interesting thing is my very first client, Rob Davis, is an African-American long snapper and one of the last. Ed Perry used to snap for the Miami Dolphins, and then African-Americans kind of disappeared. And I'm not sure that there's a reason. A lot

of times players snap because they can't do anything else, no offense on the football field, so it becomes a position of default. So it's possible that it doesn't necessarily attract African-American snappers. As occupations go, long snapping is about as reliable as it gets in professional sports. It's the oldest average position in the NFL. That, again, is the sports economist Victor Matheson. The average long snapper has lasted six years in the league. That's significantly more than an average NFL player who has about a three-year career. Long snapping is also, on average, the lowest paid position in the NFL, although lowest paid is relative. Most long snappers earn the league minimum, which this past season was $705,000 a year for a rookie with escalations

for every additional year of service. Reed Ferguson, for instance, who just completed his sixth full-time season, earns more than a million dollars a year. Yeah, one, two, one, three, something like that. You're on it. Let's say I came down from some other universe and I didn't know much about the economy or sports or whatnot. And I hear a teacher gets paid $50,000, police officer maybe $60,000, and then the long snapper for the Buffalo Bills gets $1.3 million. But there's supply and demand. So do you think that you, in the whole ecosystem of professional sports in the NFL, do you think that you as a long snapper are overpaid, underpaid, or paid just right? That's a great question. In our ecosystem, guys reset the market every couple

of years or every year maybe. So I think in our long snapping ecosystem, nobody's really going to break the bank. It's really just rising tide lifts all boats. What would you be doing if you weren't playing in the NFL now? I originally wanted to be an FBI agent. That was plan B for a long time. But at this point, I feel like I've saved up enough money to where I kind of don't have to worry about finding something immediately. Ferguson may have several more good earning years ahead of him. My internal goal is to set the most consecutive games played, A, for a snapper and or B, for the Buffalo Bills. So, you know, 15, 16 years,

if that's what it takes me to get there, I'd love to play as long as I can keep the job. You may recall that L.P. Latticer, aka Louis-Philippe Ladusseur, kept his job with the Cowboys for 16 seasons. How is this longevity possible in such a physical game? For one thing, long snapper is a relatively safe position, especially with the protective rules the NFL added some years back. You just don't have as much opportunity to get hurt as someone who's running with the ball or trying to tackle the ball carrier. But Victor Matheson says there is another reason. He says teams don't have much incentive to bring in a new long snapper very often, especially because they are relatively low earners.

Once you have a player that you can trust, it's hard to break into that market, especially because this is a market that people generally do the job perfectly until they don't. And because so few mistakes are made, that doesn't leave a whole lot of openings for people trying to break in. In other words, once a long snapper has mastered the technique, he becomes increasingly valuable to the team. His skills don't deteriorate year to year as much as a player who relies on running fast, throwing far, or hitting hard. All the long snapper does is bend over and snap the ball. How hard can that be?

And because of the hyper-specialization that Victor Matheson and Bill Belichick talked about earlier, the long snapper has a lot of time to keep mastering his technique, to fine-tune the details. Chris Rubio again. You know, how fast is their snap going? Does it look smooth? Is the spiral going well? And Reed Ferguson. For a punt, I need to make sure I hit him in a certain window so he knows every time he goes out there for a punt, this snap is going to be in this general area. So that's one less thing that he's got to think about. I call it the Rubio zone,

basically the lowest rib to mid-thigh, armpit to armpit. The punt is more of a caveman type snap where I say don't snap it to the punter, snap it through him. But it's different for a field goal or PAT where you're snapping to the holder who's just eight yards away. The PAT is a little bit more finesse

where you don't want to burn it at him. So then you're just basically flicking it back with your arms. Correct. The most important thing would be to make sure the laces are correct every time. Because if they're faced back at the kicker, you know, that affects the kick. I wanted to be accurate with my laces. And LP latticer. That means when the ball hits the holder, the laces are already facing forward.

So all the holder has to do is put the ball down at the spot. Can you explain that? Because to me, that sounds impossible. At eight yards, you know exactly how many rotations it takes to get to the holder's hand. And so the way you place your hand on the ball, you have always the exact same rotation that lands into the holder's hand. That means you also need to be exactly consistent from snap to snap, velocity, et cetera. Correct. So we always be the same target, same velocity, same follow-through.

We got to release the ball at the exact same spot every time between your legs. And does that mean that different long snappers have slightly different techniques? Correct. I always put my right hand on the laces, just like I throw a football. There's some long snappers out there that have to put their right hand on one of the leather panels. And then, you know, I always played with distances. So I knew if it was cold, my ball wouldn't rotate as much. I can move the ball up and back out of my stance to have like, instead of like exactly eight yards, I'd be like at seven and three quarters. I've been playing a long time and there's ways to move the line of scrimmage.

Come on now. So what you're saying really is that the long snapper is the most vital member of any football team. I wish it was so. No, we're there to make sure that the kicker has the cleanest operation possible so he can do his job. Okay. I understand why special teams are important.

I understand long snapping is sort of an art form, but still, I come back to the question, is it really worth a roster spot? Couldn't another player also learn to be perfect at long snapping? A player who can also play an offensive or defensive position? Well, I realize I'm asking you to disavow your entire livelihood but yeah i mean it's a great question you know the punt snap at 15 yards is not a natural snap for i guess a center the longest snap a center will do is a shotgun snap at maybe five yards the field goal you know it's timing you know we're you know it's a good question I wouldn't have had a job if it wasn't for the specialization of long snapping. I promised at the start of this episode that we would make you care about a football position you probably didn't even know about.

I hope we succeeded. If not, maybe it'll help you think about specialization in some other labor market, maybe your own. It happens in pretty much every corner of the economy. A new technology comes along, the smartphone for instance, and we immediately worry about all the jobs and functions it's replacing, which is worth thinking about for sure. But over time, we see all the new jobs and functions this technology makes possible, jobs we couldn't have imagined would even exist. Who gets your vote for the long snapper of the smartphone economy?

Like I said at the top of this episode, if you watched this year's Super Bowl, you didn't notice the long snapper. But last year, right after we published this episode, there was an incident in the Super Bowl where the Los Angeles Rams beat the Cincinnati Bengals. In the second quarter of the game, the Rams scored a touchdown to go up by 10 points, and they brought on their kicking team to go for the extra point in order to go up by 11 points. The place kicker was Matt Gay. The holder, who's also the team's punter, was Johnny Hecker. And the long snapper was Matthew Orzek. Last year in the NFL, the success rate on extra points was just under 94%. But not this one. Here is announcer Al Michaels.

Gay, no. Hecker pitched the ball a bad snap. Where was it? Something went wrong, for sure. Matt Gay never even got his foot on the ball, so the Rams failed to score the extra point. But was it really the snapper's fault? We called back Chris Rubio for his take. It was not a bad snap. It was maybe two inches off.

It was a little low, a little inside, but it was easily catchable. If this long snapper is not perfect, immediately everyone jumps on. Oh God, bad snap. I was watching the clip of it yesterday. And even the announcer, oh, bad snap. You know how they, and the NFL games, they always let's go to John in New York. Who's the referee that's reevaluating the call. I want them to say, let's go to Rubio. What does he say? And I'll be like, hell no. it was not a bad snap, man. Are you kidding? It's

right there. The damn holder should have caught it. So that's what our long snapping expert thinks. But you may be thinking, well, of course, the long snapping expert is going to defend the long snapper. So we went right to the source. Matthew Orzek, and I'm a NFL long snapper for the Los Angeles Rams. And how does Orzek describe what I'm a NFL long snapper for the Los Angeles Rams. And how does Orzek describe what happened on that missed extra point? That snap wasn't perfect by my standards, and the operation starts with me. So I kind of hang my hat and responsibility on me, and where most people would look at Johnny and say,

ah, it was a perfect snap, he just dropped it. But my laces weren't perfectly up, and I didn't make him spin it too many times that season. So he actually wasn't that used to catching it with the laces off and having to spin it. This goes back to what Reed Ferguson and LP Latticer told us earlier. Really the relationship between the snapper and the holder is vital to getting laces. If you snap the same speed rotation and hit the same general location when you throw it, it should have the same amount of rotations each time. So the holder can catch the ball with the laces facing the goalposts. And so he just has to put it down and hit the spot rather than if the laces aren't perfectly

at 12 o'clock, as we call them, he has to try to spin them to get them to that point. Honestly, I got over that ball and I said, all right, you're a little excited. Let's try to calm down a little bit and relax. And then I over relaxed and snapped it a little bit slower and didn't rotate as fast. So under rotated. In the end, the missed extra point didn't really matter. The Rams won the game by three points. So proud to have been on that team in the right place, right time, because as a snapper,

your role in getting to the Super Bowl is pretty limited. It's just don't mess up your job all season and you did your part. So I was just honored to be on that team with those guys and to be able to share that for the rest of our lives, really.

That's it for our show today. Thanks to all our long-snapping experts for their insight. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, the first episode in a series about an industry many people absolutely love to hate. I hate flying. I hate flying. Jet lag sucks.

Being stuck in a tiny seat sucks. So we've been on hold for an hour and a half just to hear you say that. There's nothing that you can do at all. Our luggage didn't make it on that tight connection. Does airline travel deserve the hate it receives? We're going to spend a few episodes trying to answer that question and many other questions we have about air travel. I'd say the most difficult part is dealing with our political leaders.

We were already going into lockdown and he said, Sarah, we got a problem. I said, I know. I had a smoke and fumes emergency when I was departing Guam. And when you have an internal fire, you have not a lot of time. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes.

This episode was produced by Ryan Kelly and mixed by Greg Rippin with help from Jeremy Johnston. Our staff also includes Zach Lipinski, Morgan Levy, Catherine Moncure, Alina Coleman, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Julie Canfor, Eleanor Osborne, Jasmine Klinger, Daria Klenert, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, and Elsa Hernandez. The Freakonomics Radio Network's executive team is Neil Carruth, Gabriel Roth, and me, Stephen Dubner. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. All the other music is composed by Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening. What did I not ask you that I should have? Or is there anything else about the role that I should know? No, I think that you have definitely exhausted the snapper.

I spent more time on this than I've probably spent my 28 years on the Competition Committee. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.