Pete Lembo On The Impact of "Hidden Yards"

South Carolina's special teams coordinator Pete Lembo talked about how the difference of a few yards on special team plays can accumulate over the course of a game.

If you're a college football fan who indulges in every second of every game you can find on television, you may have picked up on something that was a mainstay in college football last weekend, bad special teams play. 

With modern college football geared around offensive play, you can see how there would be more mishandled snaps, more missed field goals and PATs, and more penalties on plays that, to most people, seem meaningless. Special teams coordinator Pete Lembo isn't one of those people.

Lembo treats special teams like a neurosurgeon who's about to operate on a patient; every single finite detail must be addressed because if too many little errors are allowed to slip through the cracks, it can eventually lead to adverse consequences. This is the case with something that Lembo calls hidden yards, a component that, when explained, makes an abundance of sense for why it deserves so much attention.

"I call it a formula… but for me, it's more just things that are important and assigning some values to those. So if we return a kickoff past the 25-yard line, let's say we get it to the 31, that would be plus six in hidden yards because if it was a fair catch or a touchback, we would've gotten it at the 25 [yard line]. When you start getting into some of the turnovers and those kind of things, we add a lot of value to that because of the importance of it and how it can change the game. Penalties are a huge thing because you get a 20-yard return and there's a holding penalty, the net [hidden yards] is -30 because of the hold or where the holding occurred. So we want the guys to be very aware of making good decisions and how those impact the game."

Lembo specifically acknowledged some of the recent punt returns that have gone awry for the Gamecocks the last couple of weeks, plays that against better competition could make a bigger difference in the game's final outcome.

"You know we had the punt return for a touchdown against Charlotte that got called back because of a penalty. Then last week, on one of the blocked punts, we tried to pick it up, and it ended up being a muff that the opponent recovered… we can't make that kind of mistakes; we can't leave those yards out on the field against SEC opponents beginning this week."

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