“I don’t know, really know, all of what he’s doing in there, but it seems like it’s very important to him,” DeOssie said.

Indeed it is, Tynes said one day last week as he held up the three basic types of shoes that he used. At first glance, all of them looked the same. They were Nike Tiempo shoes, a classic soccer cleat of which various versions have been worn by soccer stars like Ronaldinho of Brazil and Paolo Maldini of Italy.

A closer look, though, showed Tynes’s handiwork. The first shoe, which Tynes called his turf shoe, had the top three studs on the instep side shaved down significantly; the second, which he called his grass shoe, was also shaved but not nearly as short; the third shoe, which Tynes used on kickoffs, was not modified “because the ball is teed up so there is no issue getting under it,” Tynes said.

That notion of being able to sweep under the ball is the motivating factor for all of this do-it-yourself work. In 2004, midway through his rookie season with the Kansas City Chiefs, Tynes said, he became frustrated because he felt his shoes were not sliding through the turf smoothly on his kicks.

A few days later, he went into the workroom of the team’s groundskeeper and — very, very cautiously — lowered his cleat onto a spinning metal wheel that the groundskeeper used to sharpen lawn mower blades.