Winning and losing... In a snap

Long snappers are anonymous, faceless characters, playing football upside down and backward. If anybody finds out who they are, it's usually because something went wrong.

"No one knows us until we mess up," said Rob Davis, the Green Bay Packers' long snapper.

And right now, everyone knows Trey Junkin.

After peeking at punters and place-kickers from between his legs for 19 mostly uneventful years in the NFL, Junkin botched two crucial snaps Sunday in a playoff game for the New York Giants.

Twice in the fourth quarter of the wild-card game, Junkin's snaps went haywire, costing the Giants field goals that could have beaten the San Francisco 49ers. Instead, New York let a 24-point lead slip away and lost 39-38.

"If he went out today, I bet he'd snap 10 in a row perfect," Hall of Fame kicker Jan Stenerud said. "You don't notice the snapper until something goes wrong. It's like a bad intersection. Most times, there's no stop light until there's an accident."

The Giants signed the 41-year-old Junkin just days before the playoff game because of a series of kicking problems all season -- mostly with the long snapper. A half-dozen players tried what seems a simple task, most ending badly.

Junkin, who had done the job seamlessly for so long, seemed a sensible solution. Now he finds himself explaining two brutal failures.

"I really feel like I blew these guys' chances to go to the Super Bowl," he said with tears in his eyes.

It won't happen again. Junkin, who was paid $12,500 for this cameo appearance, said he would not play again. "I'm done," he said. "I'm gone."

There is a delicate chemistry that exists between snapper, holder and kicker. If any part of the mechanism fails, the sequence falls apart.

"It's all in the timing," Stenerud said. "It all starts with the snapper. The last thing I wanted to hear was any confusion between the snapper and the holder."

Each year in training camp, Stenerud would work with a snapper and holder and then, just before the start of the season, the snapper would get cut to save a salary. Somebody else, often Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell, would inherit the job.

Stenerud would appeal the roster decision, to no avail.

"The coach would say, 'Just go kick the football,"' he said.

And then Stenerud would start all over again, working on timing and mechanics, something the Giants struggled with all season.

"The Giants did the right thing. They brought in a veteran guy who had done it his whole life," Stenerud said. "They did the right thing, and it came out wrong.

"It happens. You can miss a putt from 2 feet."

Or a snap from 8 yards.

That's the distance from snapper to holder. From snapper to punter, it's 15 yards. In both cases, the snapper is supposed to get the ball there in less than a second, then look up and locate somebody to block -- provided, of course, some defensive lineman hasn't already teed off on him.

Swell job, huh?

Davis sympathized with Junkin. "I feel absolutely horrible for Trey," he said. "He's a pioneer at our position.

"I've seen this happen a couple of times. No one is immune."

Davis said there is a technique to long snapping. There has to be a balance between velocity and accuracy.

"For punts, the goal is to get the kick off in under two seconds," he said. "I have about seven-tenths of a second to get the ball to him. On place kicks, the holder is half that far away, so I have about three-tenths of a second.

"Watching replays of Junkin, it looked like he didn't have enough 'oomph' on the ball. But the last thing you want to do is snap too hard. It's an art not everybody can perform."

Everybody thinks they can, though.

"I hear that all the time -- what an easy job I've got," Davis said. "Everybody wants this job, except on Sunday."

Long snappers are the most ignored players on the roster. None is invited to the Pro Bowl.

"It's the nature of the beast," Davis said. "We'd all love to be the Reggie Whites, the Kellen Winslows, the Jeremy Shockeys of the world."

The long snappers all wanted to be Trey Junkin.

Except on Sunday.