Doyel: Colts kicker/punter Pat McAfee bidding for perfect season

The brick house shook as he thundered soccer balls against it, but that didn’t alert Pat McAfee to the lightning in his right leg. The time he kicked the cover off the ball? That didn’t do it either. McAfee first understood what he had, what his future held, that day of soccer when the goalkeeper blocked his shot.

And the ball snapped his arm in half.

Pat McAfee was 12.

“That was the first time I knew something was going on,” he says.

The second time? Football camp at Plum High School outside Pittsburgh. A kicking camp. McAfee was 14, a soccer player at Plum – didn’t even play football – but the camp was being held right there. So what the hell, you know? McAfee walked onto the football field, teed up a ball and booted it just barely over the crossbar.

He was 60 yards away.

“I realized,” McAfee says, “this was potentially a very good thing financially for me and my family.”

McAfee’s parents followed him to Indianapolis. He helped his dad start McAfee Distribution, selling wood finishes. These days Pat McAfee is a corporation unto himself, a professional comedian and public speaker and owner of McAfee Distribution and a real estate company. Also he kicks footballs for the Indianapolis Colts. He kicks them very hard. Because he was right when he was 12. He was right when he was 14. He was more right than he knew.

Pat McAfee might just have the most perfect kicking leg in NFL history. And he is having the closest thing the league has seen to a perfect season.

* * *

McAfee wants more, of course. Almost perfect means he’s almost satisfied. Almost. But to know what he wants, you have to know what he has done, five games into this season:

As a kickoff man, he has kicked it 22 times. One was a planned dribbler down the field against Buffalo, and was downed immediately for a return of 0 yards. Of the 21 times he has kicked it as far as he can, he has recorded 21 touchbacks. Almost all went through the end zone. At least five went through the uprights.

“Every one should do that,” McAfee says. “If it doesn’t, I failed.”

This season he is the only kickoff man with all touchbacks on deep kicks. Sebastian Janikowski of the Raiders has allowed seven returns in 25 kicks. New England’s Stephen Gostkowski? Seven in 31 kicks. Two of the strongest-legged kickers in the NFL. No comparison.

McAfee works with veteran Colts place-kicker Adam Vinatieri on the kickoff – “I’m picking a Hall of Famer’s brains,” McAfee says – and their connection is so good, special teams coordinator Tom McMahon gets out of the way.

“I go shag balls and let Pat work (on his kickoffs) with Vinny,” McMahon says. “They’ve come up with something to get the extra yards. I won’t tell you what it is.”

Vinatieri and McAfee wouldn’t, either, but both gave a boxing analogy.

“Imagine a heavyweight fighter, punching someone in the face,” Vinatieri says. “You don’t make contact and just stop there. Your fist keeps going.”

McAfee is nodding.

“I take a crow-hop through the ball,” he says. “Basically, I’m trying to knock the (expletive) out.”

Nobody has ever gone a full NFL season allowing 0 kickoff return yards. McAfee is one-third there.

Says Colts long snapper Matt Overton: “Ask the guys on the kickoff team: Is it fun? ‘It would be if McAfee would let us make a play.’ They’re frothing at the mouth to tackle somebody. Pat won’t let 'em.”

And kicking isn’t what McAfee does best.

The man’s a punter, All-Pro last season, and this season he’s better. He averages a career-best 48 yards, eighth in the league, but his net average – punt yardage minus return yardage – is 46.5. The single-season NFL record for net punting is 44.2, set in 2013 by the Rams’ Johnny Hekker.

Understand what is happening here? McAfee is having a kickoff season that has never been had. He is having a punting season that has never been had. He has swung his leg a total of 43 times – 22 kickoffs, 21 punts – and allowed 33 return yards. Combined. All season.

And McAfee, he’s not happy about those 33 yards.

“I would like that number to be a little less,” he says, crediting gunners Winston Guy, Clayton Geathers and Colt Anderson. “The goal is zero.”

The goal is perfection. And no NFL punter/kicker has come this close.

So how did this happen? The leg is one reason. The brain is another. The football he takes to the bedroom? That’s another.

* * *

“It’s kind of sad,” McAfee was telling me. “I don’t want to say I sleep with the football. But it’s damn near.”

His punting secret is the way he drops the ball.

McAfee’s got leg muscles; don’t get it twisted. He doesn’t lift for power, more reps – he does 80 squats at a time – but those leg muscles are absurd. The house, remember? He was a kid just kicking balls off the brick wall, rattling windows, because he didn’t like video games or watching TV. He liked kicking things. All sorts of things, and he still does. He has considered setting world records in various kicking disciplines, and more on that in a minute.

For now, understand that McAfee has kicked soccer balls until the cover comes off. He did it once in practice in high school, firing a shot wide of the goal. The goalie picked up the ball and it was missing its leather, like something out of "The Natural."

McAfee broke the kid’s arm at age 12. He kicks 75-yard field goals in practice now. A few years ago a Colts employee with a baseball radar gun asked McAfee to kick a soccer ball, just to see how fast it could go. McAfee warmed up with an 85-mph kick, then said he was ready to get serious. The employee turned over a picnic table, hid behind it, stuck out the radar gun with one hand and clocked McAfee’s second and final attempt at 124 mph.

The world record is 129 mph.

McAfee thinks he can get there, and you know what? Fine. We’ll go there now. As you read earlier, McAfee is a one-man corporation. He has plans, schemes even, to maximize his earning potential. One is a video he has considered making where he records himself breaking the world record for fastest soccer kick (129 mph), kicks one of his 75-yard field goals (the NFL record is 64 yards), surpasses the record NFL punt (98 yards, with roll) and drop-kicks a rugby field goal farther than the current record (85 yards).

“I was going to say, ‘It’s the shoe,’ ” McAfee says. “It doesn’t matter the ball, it’s the shoe. I tried to do it this offseason but no shoe company took a hit at it.”

So anyway, the bed.

McAfee travels with a few items. Toothbrush and toothpaste. Change of clothes. Cell phone, charger. And a football.

The drop is the key to the whole punt, see. When he first got to the NFL, McAfee hit the ball higher up in the drop, the optimum driving spot, and didn’t worry about direction. Let the gunners do that.

Two years ago, with the NFL shifting to directional punting – not just on punts inside midfield, but on all punts – the Colts told McAfee to do the same. He watched film of punters like the Saints’ Thomas Morstead, noticed they were dropping the ball lower, and got to work.

McAfee has a football field-sized lot behind his house – coming soon to the neighborhood: an NFL goal post – and he spent the offseason testing the new drop, seeing where the ball went with each tweak. His target area is outside the numbers, the better to hem in the return man.

Brainiac that he is – forget his flamboyant personality; McAfee appears to have a genius-level IQ, and his memory is certifiably photographic – McAfee has turned the drop into a science experiment. Over time he has raised his drop a little, allowing him to swing his leg longer before making contact, and lifted the nose of the ball a bit.

Perfection requires repetition, and a football goes wherever he goes so he can practice his drop 50 times a night, sometimes 100. Every night. Before he goes to sleep.

“It’s pathetic, almost,” he says.

No. It’s perfect, almost.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel