By Michael Cohen/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


They took the field on the fringes of a remarkable comeback, trailing by five and the clock dwindling in the NFC Championship Game.
Steven Hauschka, kicker for the Seattle Seahawks, lined up for an onside kick. With four steps and a downward thump of his right foot, he launched into motion a parabolic nightmare for a franchise, city and state.
Hauschka’s kick slammed into the turf at CenturyLink Field and arced 11 or 11{ yards downfield, the perfect distance for teammates careening toward the hands team of the Green Bay Packers. The wrong player jumped to catch it, and the ball caromed off the helmet of reserve tight end Brandon Bostick. The Seahawks recovered. They scored a touchdown to take the lead. In overtime, they scored again to win the game.
That the comeback involved a successful onside kick, one of the most random and fortuitous plays in all of football, speaks to the improbability of the Seahawks’ triumph. Converted only six times in each of the last two years across the NFL, an onside kick invokes creativity and precision for an oblong object devoid, for the most part, of predictability. It’s an unusual act on an unlikely play, and perfect execution is no guarantee of success.
“You have to get a little lucky,” said Packers kicker Mason Crosby.
Like most kickers, Crosby’s introduction to the onside kick began with a simplistic style that is equal parts old school and fluke.
Most commonly known as the low roller, the play requires the kicker to drive the ball hard along the ground in an end-over-end pattern. Eventually, a larger bounce should pop the ball into the air to allow the kickoff team a chance to snag it.
But Crosby and former all-pro kicker Norm Johnson, who played for special teams coordinator Ron Zook in Pittsburgh, said a shift in ideology from multiple-bounce onside kicks to single-bounce onside kicks ushered in a new learning curve in the last quarter century. Instead of dribbling the ball along the turf, which left plenty to chance given the shape of a football, kickers began blasting the ball into the ground off the tee to produce one massive bounce that, in theory, would cover the 10-yard requirement for recovery.
This style, known as the spike kick, is one that Crosby did not learn until the second half of his college career, when he realised advancing to the NFL was a legitimate possibility.
He experimented with multiple techniques that used varying angles of contact, and it wasn’t until his second season with the Packers that he settled on a consistent approach - by copying punter Derrick Frost.
“He actually showed me how he did it,” Crosby said. “He launched these spike kicks, and I was like, ‘Well, I have to work on that.’
“I actually hit down on it with my toe flexed down and just get past the ball and drive it into the ground. I almost just hinge that knee hard and just use it as a hard hinge to slap down on the ball with my toe locked up.”
Now the preferred style across the league, the spike kick is what Hauschka used against the Packers in the NFC Championship Game and what Chicago Bears kicker Robbie Gould tried in the waning moments at Soldier Field on Sunday.
But there are plenty of approaches. Packers punter Tim Masthay, who handled kickoff duties in college at Kentucky, said good kickers will have at least six or seven options in their arsenal.
They range from the aforementioned dribbler and spike kick to a soft lob that lands just beyond the hands team, to a drag kick in which the kicker reverses direction to catch the recovery team off-guard, to a dribbler down the middle that is often fielded by the kicker himself.
Last season, when the Packers found themselves in the extremely rare situation of attempting an onside kick after a safety, the coaches called for a play borrowed from the New England Patriots.
“We had seen them do a certain kick,” Masthay said. “It seemed like a reasonably effective option. Mason practiced it for a while and he executed it during the game.
“Everybody is aware of what everyone else is doing.”
That includes identifying kickers who perfect the sleight of foot. Crosby studied former journeyman Joe Nedney because of his ability to approach the ball the same way on both deep kickoffs and surprise onside kicks, something Zook cited as a crucial skill.
The goal is to develop a uniformity of motion that offers no indication of what is about to happen. Crosby said he found more than one example of Nedney’s teammates making completely uninhibited recoveries because the opposing team had taken off down the field to block.
“His surprise onside kicks were amazing,” Crosby said.
Which brings us back to Seattle, to Hauschka’s ordinary spike kick that fuelled an extraordinary comeback.
There was no disguise, no deception, not even a hint of surprise. Hauschka bludgeoned the ball into the turf, and the randomness of football kicked in.
“It should have been game over, over and done with,” said Johnson, who also played for the Seahawks. “But crazy things happen in the NFL. The ball bounces funny.”