This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
Jon Ryan played 12 years in the NFL, two with the Green Bay Packers and 10 with the Seattle Seahawks. He won a Super Bowl with the Seahawks in 2014 and also played in the Canadian Football League.
Almost every night before a game, I had the same dream.
I would put so much pressure on myself and would get so nervous because I cared so much. In my dream, I would play the whole game, and then, when I woke up, I would think the real game was over — but I still had to get up and play.
It was always stressful waking up to that.
The pressure was always there, 24 hours a day. Even in my sleep I couldn’t escape it. I still have punting dreams — sometimes nightmares — a couple of times a week. My last game was over three years ago.
I have a recurring dream that I just can’t get the ball off the ground. It’s deep in the game, and it’s really important, and I’m just shanking every punt. They just keep getting worse and worse and worse.
As a punter, you go into every game not knowing what to expect. I’ve gone into games where I might punt once and I’ve gone into games where I might punt 10 times. You have to always be ready for anything.
The hardest part is when you have a bad punt.
You have to go back to the sideline, and you might stand there in your dirty diaper for 45 minutes or an hour — maybe even for the rest of the game. So the ability to forget the last punt and move onto the next one is the biggest mental hurdle that, unless you’ve been there before, is hard to understand.
It’s so unique what we do as punters and kickers. I developed some tools for overcoming the nerves and moving on. But first, a quick story:
You always dream about your first punt in the NFL. It was 2006. I came from a little college in Regina, Saskatchewan, where I never played in front of more than 5,000 people. Now I was in Lambeau Field in Green Bay playing in front of 70,000 people. Brett Favre was my quarterback. It was a completely foreign environment.
You have an impossible amount of nerves when you’re that young. You can’t even quite wrap your mind around it. I was just trying to hold onto my job. I knew I could be cut at any time. That was always in the back of my mind. That pressure.
And then my very first punt in the NFL was not a good one. I hit an absolute line drive, a worm burner, a dribbler, and it ended up going about 35 yards with no hang time. Luckily some rookie named Devin Hester was the returner that day. His first game in the NFL. He didn’t return that punt very far. But later in the game, he took one to the house on me.
All week afterward our coach was in our ears: “I can’t believe we let some rookie nobody return a punt on us. How could we do that? This is trash.” He only turned out to be the greatest returner in history.
Early in my career, I’d sit on the sideline and dwell on a bad punt. I didn’t have the mental capability to just flush it. If I had a bad punt, I’d think that could be the end of my job, the end of my career.
As I got older, I became more used to what was going to happen. When I was coached by special teams coordinator Brian Schneider in Seattle, he knew that no one was going to be harder on me than myself, so he never said anything to me. I learned how to move on by going through my routine: where the ball was on the field, where I’d be warming up and kicking into the net, being ready on third down. By leaning on those routines, I was able to flush the last punt out of my mind.
When I was younger, I always used to think the best punters were dumb. I thought that was such an advantage to be dumb and think: Oh, whatever, I f—ed up. Oh, well.
I don’t consider myself a dumb guy, but I always tried to take on that attitude. Screw it, go on to the next one. I’ll say it: I had an attitude that I was a good punter. I never hit two bad ones in a row so the next one is going to be f—ing awesome. I just tried to have that positive self talk. Man, that one was a fluke. Wait until you see this next one. I had that internal cockiness, and that’s what I would tell myself.
That kind of positive self talk really does add up and really does work. It kind of feels like you fake it until you make it a little bit, but that’s what it took, and it helped.
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll really drove that home to me. He’d always say: “If you’re in a bad mood and not feeling it today, just fake it. Eventually you’ll be in a good mood.” I took on that same attitude with bad punts and confidence.
But the nerves never really went away. Even during the last four years of my career, when I went back and played in the CFL, I felt them. Sometimes I played in front of 8,000 people, but the nerves were the exact same way.
I learned during my career there were two kinds of nerves. There was being nervous because you cared so much and you wanted so badly to succeed. And there was being nervous because you weren’t ready.
In my whole career, I was never, ever nervous because I wasn’t ready. I was always nervous because I cared so much. I’d always say: “If those are my nerves then I’m fine.”
Looking back, had I known I’d be most well known for a single touchdown pass, I might not have stressed so much about the punting part.
— As told to Jayson Jenks
