Ranking the NFC South’s special teams and coaching
Ranking the NFC South’s special teams and coaching:
Special teams
Falcons kicker Matt Bryant has five consecutive seasons of being better than 86 percent on field goals, and Atlanta houses the NFL’s most accomplished punt returner ever in Devin Hester.
New Orleans punter Thomas Morstead’s career average of 47 yards per punt is tied for second-best in NFL history.
Ted Ginn Jr.’s return to the Panthers and the additions the team made after a horrendous year on special teams put Carolina just above Tampa Bay, which still didn’t know who its kicker would be until late in the preseason.
Coaching
New Orleans’ Sean Payton has a ring and has won nearly two-thirds of the games he’s coached, so it’s clear why he’s atop this list.
No. 2 and 3 get tricky. Lovie Smith and Ron Rivera have nearly identical winning percentages, and Smith’s lone Super Bowl trip can be just as easily claimed by Rivera, who was the defensive coordinator for that Bears run. In Rivera’s first year as the Panthers’ coach, he took a two-win team and turned it into a six-win team. Smith turned a four-win Bucs team into a two-win team last year. Advantage: Riverboat.
Dan Quinn could be as fine a head coach as he was a defensive coordinator, but we have no clue yet.
Special teams
1 Atlanta
2 New Orleans
3 Carolina
4 Tampa Bay
Coaching
1 Sean Payton, New Orleans
2 Ron Rivera, Carolina
3 Lovie Smith, Tampa Bay
4 Dan Quinn, Atlanta
This story was originally published August 31, 2015 at 9:58 PM with the headline "Ranking the NFC South’s special teams and coaching."