Sherman’s third round tank run out of Green Bay

By Os Davis  |   Thursday, August 24, 2006  |  Comments( 1 )

Green Bay Packers
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Yes, it's true: The not so-long, strange enough trip that was B.J. Sander's NFL career is over. Probably. The Green Bay Packers announced the punter's release on Monday, and one team's fans haven't been this happy to see a draft-day bust exit town since the Detroit Lions gave Joey Harrington the boot a few months ago.

The Pack actually traded up to select Sander in the third round of the 2004 draft under the auspices of then GM Mike Sherman. Green Bay fans suffered shock and trauma with the announcement of the choice, but the man had won the Ray Guy Award for best NCAA punter for the Ohio State Buckeyes. Of course, the Buckeyes' brain trust had seen fit to have him collect a lot of pine time during the 2001 and 2002 seasons, slotting him in the starting spot in his fifth season in 2003, mostly out of necessity.

(Sander is even left-footed: a nice conversation piece.)

Immediately, there were problems. Sander was called by the decidedly less-than-objective Green Bay Press-Gazette as having "one of the worst preseasons in the NFL." Trying to put a positive spin on things, the newspaper reported that Sander "has not been the NFL's worst punter in this preseason." Sander ended up taking exactly zero snaps at punter for the Pack in 2004.

With 2005 came faint rays of hope. Unfortunately, they shone mostly in Germany. Sander performed well enough for NFL Europe's Hamburg Sea Devils and in training camp to win the starting job. In fact, in the first nine games, Sander could have been considered a bright spot on a 2-7 team, averaging over 40 yards per punt.

And then the wheels came off. Green Bay folk essentially came to figure that Sander was soft and couldn't take the cold. Whatever the cause of Sander's precipitous drop, the numbers show that in the next five games, the Packers called on him 30 times. Sanders averaged 35.7 yards per punt and placed the ball inside the 20 just three times, after getting it in the red zone eight times in 34 previous attempts. Sander sat the final two games of the season.

Sander went through the motions this year, and now few are sorry to see him go. Seemingly cursed from the go, even Sander's official player photo (you can see it online at ESPN.com, Yahoo! sports, etc.) went, like his punts, horribly awry: Check out how the nice Bela Lugosi cut is off-center. To add online insult to injury, the last paragraph of Sander's Wikipedia entry - yes, B.J. freaking Sander has a Wikipedia entry - yesterday stated that the Kansas City Chiefs had been showing interest in the troubled punter. That reference is now gone.

(I did see it, really. "Proof" that I did is here.)

So long, B.J. Sander. We hardly knew ye.

And when the preseason is over, I'll miss these odd career obituaries. Won't you?

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About Os Davis

Os Davis has taken a twisted route to get to RealFootball365.com in his nearly 17 years in professional writing, working in any number of capacities in the sportswriting, news reporting and film criticism worlds. In print media, Os has served as editor at a few publications, including Albuquerque's...
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