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Bryan Anger is calm in the eye of the Jaguars’ punting hurricane.
“I’m a laid-back guy in general,’” Anger said Saturday during the Jaguars’ weekend minicamp. “A laid-back more quiet guy, so I guess I’ve just always been known to kind of deal with things well. It comes with the territory.”
Anger has brushed off the storm of controversy that started when the Jaguars took him in the third round of the NFL Draft. That was considered too high for a punter by most draft experts.
The pick was even mocked by Rich Eisen, who works for the NFL Network and said he wanted a punter in the green room next year.
And it was even noticed by the satire magazine The Onion, which published a spoof with a fake quote from Anger saying, “ I will punt the Jaguars to greatness.”
Anger’s brother sent him a copy of the story. “At first I was like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ ” Anger said. “But I read through the rest and realized it was a big joke. It was funny, comical. I was laughing. My brother said, ‘Should we be concerned about this?’ And he was cracking up, so it’s all right.”
Anger’s selection has ignited a debate on just how valuable a punter is.
There are numbers crunchers who insist that the difference between a great punter and a good one has only a minor impact on winning. But Anger noted that most coaches think it is an important part of the game.
“Field position is huge if you can pin a team deep,” he said.
Special teams coach John Bonamego said Anger probably wouldn’t have lasted through the fourth round, and the Jaguars had already traded their fourth-round pick. Bonamego said the consensus of other special-teams coaches is the Jaguars made a good move in getting him.
“I heard from a lot of other special-teams coaches, and you’ll probably find one or two who might say that was too early, but the overwhelming consensus is you got yourself a great punter,” Bonamego said. “He was far and away better than the next-best guy, and there are a number of them who are going to punt in this league, if not this year, then next year.’’
“All I know is that I’ve been doing this 14 years and I haven’t seen one like this [at this stage].”
Bonamego said when Terry McDonough, the Jaguars’ director of player personnel, came to Bonamego’s office and told him they were selecting Anger in the third round, “I was all on board with it.”
Bonamego said he started with a list of 12 punters this year and looked at least 40 punts by each of them. He liked what he saw of Anger and watched every punt in every game he played, in addition to the scouting combine and East-West Shrine Game, including the practices.
Bonamego then went to California to work him out and have dinner with him.
“I wanted to find out what was between his ears,’’ Bonamego said. “He’s a bright kid who’s played at a very high level. Any great golfer will tell you the same thing. It is a mental game, and those guys have to be mentally into it and concentrate and go out and perform on four seconds’ notice.”
Anger’s also impressed head coach Mike Mularkey, who said he timed every one of Anger’s punts Saturday, which had a consistent 5.1-second hang time.
“Rarely do you have a guy that kicks it that far that can hang it for that long,” Mularkey said. “It’s either a trajectory shot that is right down the field that’s returnable in most cases, but rarely do you see ones that can be kicked that far and hang that high where you can actually go down and defend the return. That’s what I see.”
After punting 255 times at Cal for a 43.5-yard average (38.2 net), he became the highest punter selected since Todd Sauerbrun was taken by the Bears in the second round in 1995.
Now Anger is ready to take the next step and silence the critics who thought the Jaguars reached for him.
“As long as I perform, people will realize what’s going on and [be] kind of quiet, I guess. Kickers and punters never really get attention unless something goes really, really wrong, so hopefully that doesn’t happen,’’ he said.