Did you hear the one about the Panthers’ punter who (sort of) head-butted a Dolphin?
Carolina Panthers punter Johnny Hekker knows you saw it. He knows you laughed at it. But he wants you to know something else.
“It was not a head butt,” Hekker told The Charlotte Observer after the game.
Hekker was involved in one of the most bizarre plays of the Panthers’ 42-21 loss to the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, and he was still feeling bad about it in the postgame locker room. Separately, he also was impressed with the acting job performed by Miami linebacker Cameron Goode.
“Our facemasks barely touched,” Hekker said. “The guy — I’m not sure if he practices that, or how he sold it so well.”
The officials called Hekker for unnecessary roughness on the play. But Hekker said Goode flopped.
“Our facemasks barely touched,” Hekker said.
Still, Hekker took the blame for the penalty, which ultimately wasn’t marched off because the Dolphins were called for a different penalty on the same play, so the two flags offset.
Said Hekker of the play: “Maybe (I) got baited a little bit. ... I put myself in a bad situation. I gotta own that. It was nothing worth pursuing. The play was dead and over. There was no reason to go back after the guy. ... I gotta be like what you’re taught as a kid and just walk away.”
Let’s back up a second.
By the time this punt occurred, the outcome was decided. The Panthers (now 0-6) were down, 35-14, in the fourth quarter, to Miami (5-1). Hekker took exception to something Goode did — he didn’t say exactly what in our interview — and gave him a shove after the play was over.
That shove had some impact, but the 6-3, 245-pound Goode didn’t go down from that. However, when Hekker pressed forward and the two touched helmets, Goode fell straight back onto the ground at Hard Rock Stadium like he’d been hit with an anvil. It was so funny in real time that CBS announcer Kevin Harlan, watching the replay, yelled “Down goes Frazier!” to mimic a famous boxing call.
I asked Panthers wide receiver Adam Thielen later what he thought about the play.
“Obviously, it was a flop,” Thielen said. “But at the same time, I love that (what Hekker did). … I don’t care who you are or what position you play. If someone’s coming at you and doing some cheap, yeah, get in their face. Who cares?”
The entire game supplied far more TV time than Hekker — one of the best punters in NFL history and a member of the All-Decade team for the 2010s — usually gets. He also was involved in a more significant play earlier in the game, when the Panthers ran a fake punt on fourth-and-8. At the time, Carolina was ahead 14-7 and had the ball at its own 49.
On the play, Carolina had Hekker throw a short pass to Laviska Shenault Jr., who came up inches shy of the first down. The Dolphins quickly scored a game-tying touchdown after that.
“If the yardage was a little shorter, it would have been great,” Hekker said. “Or, if I had put the ball a little further out in front of him so he could turn and run … it just didn’t work out. We were an aggressive team today. We knew with that caliber of offense … you got to try to steal possessions. I applaud Coach for letting us run it.”
Panthers coach Frank Reich said Chris Tabor, the special teams coordinator, had convinced him the play could work in the right circumstances.
“As a head coach, that’s the first fake punt I’ve called,” Reich said. “They made me a believer during the week that this could work, and we just missed it by a few inches. We said we would go anywhere to all the way up to fourth-and-10, because we thought it would be a big play.”
Instead, it missed by an eyelash, part of a forgettable day for Hekker.
You could say in fact, other than that 14-0 lead the Panthers raced out to in the first quarter, that Hekker’s whole day was a … wait for it …
Flop.
