To be a professional long snapper is to have your worth measured by maybe a half-dozen plays every week. A pass-fail exam each time for a brotherhood of perfectionists. But the job is also a quest. Do it well enough, and there is stability and longevity in a game not noted for either. There is general health, or better odds for it. There are multimillion-dollar contracts that buy a lot of freedom when you’re done. So maybe you get a beer named after you, or maybe you close a Tony Robbins seminar at midnight, or maybe you just drop your kid at school and hit golf balls in paradise.
At a position more or less immune to the bloodthirst of the sport — to the idea of earning a living by inflicting pain — a snapping career can be a rapture. Thirty-two lightning bolts waiting for a bottle. “We’re always working to be better so we can stay and hang out with the cool kids,” says Tennessee Titans snapper Morgan Cox, now in his 16th season. “The joke has always been that we’re all the same guy, basically. We’re just fired up to be out here.”
Show up, work hard. Sling a ball through your legs. Lastly — in the not-so-refined words of the Prince of Pittsburgh — don’t be an a–hole.
And, lo, the gates swing open to football nirvana. (...)
Beyond the self-deprecation — seems it was a collectively transcendent moment when EA Sports put long snappers into its “Madden 26” video game — lies the truth that the job matters. The most common margin of victory in NFL regular-season games for the past quarter century? Three points. A reliable kicking operation, especially given the increasingly superpowered legs of the kickers themselves, is a weapon. A faulty one opens black holes.
So these men take the trade seriously. “I don’t know if people understand how much of an art snapping is, and how much detail goes into it,” Buffalo Bills snapper Reid Ferguson says. They work by the fraction of an inch. Aim small, miss small, and hit your spot, is how a college coach long ago explained it to former Bears snapper Patrick Mannelly, who put his name on an award annually given to the nation’s best college player at the position. On field goal attempts, the laces must hit the holder’s hands such that he simply puts the ball down before the kick. What looks like a fine effort might turn a snapper salty for a week. And never mind the catastrophe of an actual bad snap.
“It’s like you’re a professional dart thrower and you’ve got seven plays a game,” says Clint Gresham, the snapper for the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl XLVIII winners. “And if one of them is not perfect, then you’re kind of a failure.”
Thanks to a rule change in 2006, teams cannot set rushers up directly over the long snapper. It’s better, but only incrementally so: The metahumans to block are now less than a foot to the right and left. Imagine hunching over, throwing a ball perfectly and then contending with, say, former No. 1 overall pick and All-Pro linebacker Mario Williams in the A-gap. “I felt like he slapped me in the head twice before I even realized the play was happening,” says Cox, a five-time Pro Bowler.
“Everyone watches us Monday through Saturday and goes, ‘That looks like an easy job,’” says J.J. Jansen, who holds the Carolina Panthers career record for most games played, at 271 and counting. “Because Monday through Saturday, it is. But on Sunday at 4:15 p.m., when you gotta hit a game-winning field goal, everyone’s on the sideline praying.”
Still, the line at the door keeps getting longer.
That a line exists, at all, isn’t new. The list of participants at long snapping guru Chris Rubio’s camps who then went on to play in college dates back two decades. What’s wild is the current starting point. San Francisco 49ers snapper Jon Weeks first attended the Rubio camp in 2004, out of high school. By the time he was a senior at Baylor, revisiting as a counselor, morning sessions began with attendees in sixth grade. Ferguson remembers coaching a fourth-grader at the camp. And that fourth-grader, Quentin Skinner, went on to snap at LSU and Troy.
“It’s something that opens doors,” Weeks says. “Parents have realized, at least at the college level, you don’t have to be this 6-foot-3 monster to get your school paid for and play football.”
The depth of training is certainly an evolution from a Duke assistant coach telling Mannelly to hone the craft by hitting a goal post, stripped of padding, 10 times in a row after practice. This is more like building bent-over androids. “I’m addicted to snapping,” says Chris Stoll, who won the Mannelly Award in 2022 and signed a three-year contract with the Seahawks out of Penn State. “We can get so much better by just moving your thumb position or, like, keeping your weight on your insteps more.”
The math is daunting: hundreds of college spots bottlenecking into 32 NFL jobs. It doesn’t stop anyone from trying to squeeze through, given what’s on the other side.
A long snapper’s value, in short, is not being a problem. In one interpretation, that is tending to business and being a good dude. (...)
Disaster prevention and peace of mind, though, are mostly what the money is for. Scoring in the NFL in 2025 is tied for the second-highest rate ever. Every point is immense. Thus, per Over the Cap, 15 long snappers are signed for more than $1 million guaranteed. “You don’t realize how important they are until you don’t got one,” says longtime Steelers special teams coach Danny Smith. It’s not avant-garde personnel management; multiyear contracts for snappers date back decades. The outlay is minimal in a sport featuring 23 players with more than $100 million in guarantees. But it’s a reasonable price for one less thing to worry about.
“If I was the (coach) at the podium, it’s something I would never want to be thinking about,” Packers kicker Brandon McManus says. “When you feel like you have someone and you’re comfortable and can turn a blind eye to it, it’s a great feeling.” (...)
This golden ratio of trust and money, both hard-earned, creates enviable stability. “Most NFL players and most athletes in general have access to a ton of money, a ton of fame,“ Jansen says, “but they’re sort of nomads.” An NFL long snapper career, on average, lasts 7.5 years. The rate for all other positions is less than half that. How refreshing, in a game where tenure can be a punch line, to establish roots. To make a plan. Jansen has lived in three houses in one city while buying a small stake in the AHL Charlotte Checkers. Ferguson, who signed a four-year, $6.5 million extension in March, has invested in a restaurant and a soccer franchise in Buffalo. No, it is not the $250 million in guarantees Josh Allen received to quarterback the Bills, but any apples-to-apples comparison sort of misses the point.
At 31, the team’s most anonymous player already has steady footing for decades. “Whenever it does end, we’ve provided ourselves enough financial security to where I don’t immediately have to look for a job to support the family,” Ferguson says. “Honestly, it’s the best.”
Even when NFL realities upend everything, it might not matter. When Cox lost his job with the Ravens in 2021, he landed with the franchise 200 miles from his hometown of Collierville, Tenn., where he planned to settle down anyway. “‘Dream’ doesn’t even feel like it does it justice,” he says.
by Brian Hamilton, The Athletic | Read more:
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[ed. My buddy Vic was one of the best snappers I've ever seen - fast, laser-like zips. There wasn't much attention paid to this skill back then. Just basic expectations... (but we knew).]
