Tyler Ott is happy to be with the Commanders after moving down the road from Baltimore, but did not want to speak ill of DC’s struggles at his position last year, which led to Camaron Cheeseman being released late in the season – although he understood it.
“It’s a performance-based game, so the Commanders decided to move on, and it happens; guys lose it or get the yips, and you just can't recover from it. Camaron’s a good dude, and you hate to see it,” Ott told Doc & Rooster Tuesday. “Our specialist world is so small and so close that you basically see everything instantly on Twitter/X now, but you move on and for me, it's a great opportunity to come in.”
Specialists have an easy job, or so many people think, but the long snapper position (as well as kicker/punter) are some technique but also heavily mental.
“I get the question often, and I still don't know if I’ve found a good enough way of explaining the mental state. As I've gone through, I think I've been able to almost just enter that zone on game day and it's like it's muscle memory at this point,” Ott said. “I've done so many reps, seen so many different punt rushes or snapped so many field goals that it's confidence number one and then just trusting your abilities that got you into this position. It’s always a mental game, every week and day is different – I liken it to golf, where one day my driver's going down the middle and the next day I'm slicing it into the woods. Snapping is like that in a lot of ways; your laces might not be perfect day to day, but then you find a way to battle through and adjust, and you're constantly improving your craft. I've always been good at just blocking out the noise and not getting too excited or too low, just right in that kind of that flat line of emotion. That’s important for specialists, but I think for a snapper especially, just to be able to be one calm, steady rock in the operation.”
And he still has to work hard every day to keep that, but it does get easier as time goes on.
“It’s hard to explain, but I've gone through enough operation changes in my career and done enough workouts in the off-season that once I figure out the kicker’s timing and when they take their steps over and how quick they're ready, I just basically get down and get ready to pull the trigger,” Ott said. “Tress will have to pick up on Brandon's keys when he's ready, and to really get into it, it probably takes two or three practices and we'll have this whole kind of off-season together to really like to find each other's keys, and maybe a few weeks of practices to really just not even have to think about the rhythm, and be on cue with each other, where we know where Tress likes to catch it or the speed of the snap. I think a huge benefit of our group probably being one of the oldest specialist groups in the NFL now is we’ll be able to just really fit into this and start meshing together pretty easily.”
And hopefully, he'll be able to keep doing it as the NFL looks at changing some special teams rules to prevent injuries.
“I get what they're trying to do; they're trying to take the ‘most dangerous plays’ out of the game, and I think the low-hanging fruit is special teams,” Ott said. “It's an easy thing to change and you've seen the XFL and what they've implemented…the game is always evolving, right? Personally I'm not a fan, I think you're taking part of the strategy in that part of the game out of it, but whatever changes happen, there's gonna be ways to take advantage of it. That's part of having a good special teams coach and a head coach that wants to try some things and, and we'll see what we can do, and hopefully we can make it interesting still and not just a bathroom break play.”
