A Day in the Life of a Long Snapper: Talking with Bradley Northnagel
The long snapper can be the unsung hero of a football team. If you've heard of a long snapper, odds are they're the best around or absolutely terrible. A long snapper is anonymous by nature, but absolutely necessary to win a game. Look at a situation from a Raiders-Chargers game in 2012. Pro-bowl snapper John Condo left the game with a concussion, the backup hadn't snapped since college, and two botched snaps and a blocked punt later, the Raiders lost. Luckily Bradley Northnagel is as reliable as they come, starting every game in 2015 while taking over for multi-year starter John Shepardson. Placekicker Matt Anderson said that Northnagel has been so reliable, he only saw one snap come to him laces out, which belies some incredible consistency.
That consistency earned Northnagel a scholarship, given to him before the team went to Six Flags for a day off. About the feeling of getting a scholarship, Northnagel said “It’s one of those feelings, where you’re in the room with your teammates, with all of them hooting and hollering and going crazy for you, it’s exciting. It’s a true honor to be given a scholarship at a place like Cal, because you put in hard work, you get rewarded for it. I’m just really thankful to Coach Dykes and the whole staff for awarding me that.”
Northnagel didn't take the easy route to starting at long snapper, enduring a journey that Peter Jackson would have split up into three parts. From Northnagel, “I was originally recruited as a long snapper out of Serra High School, so during my freshman camp there were five long snappers and they ended up moving me over to D-Line, because we were short on guys, and then a whole whirlwind of positions happened. To make a long story short, I went from long snapper to D-Line, I gained about 60 pounds over two years, and I from about 215 to 275, almost 280, and I played D-Line for about two years and then Coach Dykes and I sat down one day and he said ‘your talent level at D-Line is not good enough for this level, would you consider moving positions?’ I said I’d love to play fullback, and he said to go work with coach Tommerdahl, so I played fullback my redshirt sophomore year. I was the backup, then our starter (Lucas Gingold) got hurt, so I played a couple games at fullback. Then, just this last year, I transitioned just to snapper because it’s what I came in as, and one of my best friends, Jon Shepardson, who was the snapper at the time, had graduated. The spot was open, and I feel it was just a fit, that’s why I was recruited, and that’s what I’m here to do.”
Northnagel earned that spot with a solid work ethic and consistency, something he credits the departed Shepardson with helping him learn. “Having that example from Jon, it’s great," Northnagel said. "He showed me how to be poised, how to take in the environment because you’re going from high school, where you’re playing in front of a thousand people, maybe, and now you’re playing in front of 60-70-80 thousand. I’m not going to lie, it’s a rush, it’s exciting, but it’s something that I learned to take in, and really let the experience take you over, but not to the point where it can change your performance. After the first game against Grambling, everything was the same, and I was able to get used to the crowd, the noise, and everything.”
There's also a matter of a daily routine. Again, specialists are a bit like the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter, they're there for those who seek them, but they do a lot during practice. “At the beginning it pretty much stays consistent, " Northnagel "We’ll come out here for our pre-practice period, we’ll get loose, we’ll get our arms loose, get our legs loose, and then once we get our helmets strapped up and pre-practice is over, we go into a pretty serious stretch period. We’ll take 15-20 minutes, jog a couple laps, get the hips loose, get the legs loose, and whatever. That’s a solid 20 minute period of just getting the legs right, because the kickers have to make sure everything’s loose, don’t want any injuries in that department. For me, I like to make sure my hips are nice and stretched out, lower back and whatnot, and that’s to get the day started. Once we hit period four or five, that’s when I’ll start snaps, because (period) ten is when we do our punt. Once we hit our punt period, we’ll do 8-12 reps depending on the day, and then once that’s over we’ll transition to the practice field. There we’ll do situational work, short yard field goals, long distance field goals, position punts, punting out of bounds, punting in, punting out of the endzone. It’s all depending on the day, coach Tommerdahl will map us out, he’ll give the punters two things to do per day, and he’ll say ‘kickers, we have short yard field goals today.’ We’ll have a long time out there, we’ll have 50 minutes depending on the day, so we can’t just get all the work done in ten minutes and nothing to do for the rest of the day. So we’ll go out there, get loose again, because (time) is all in blocks, we’ll have ten minutes where we’ll do nothing, twenty minutes where we’ll do kicking…”
CR: “It's a lot of hurry up and wait”
“Exactly, so when we’re out there, we like to make sure we’re not rushing ourselves, but we’re staying busy. We want to take the time out there to get better. We don’t want to just goof around out there. We want to come out on Saturday’s and execute to the best of our abilities.”
Northnagel estimates the amount of snaps during the average practice coming in anywhere between 70 and 100, not counting field goal snaps. His hard work is paying dividends, as his consistency points to him remaining anonymous for the most part. In his line of work, that's a good thing.