How Detroit Lions special teams coordinator Dave Fipp became The Prince of Fake Punts
Long before he was the prince of punt fakes, Detroit Lions special teams coordinator Dave Fipp played high school football for a coach known for his creativity on special teams.
Fipp was a defensive back and special teams standout at La Jolla High in California who went on to have a successful career as a walk-on at Arizona. He got into coaching immediately after he graduated and can trace both his love for the profession and his football ingenuity back to his days with Rey Hernandez.
“We treated (special teams) like a weapon,” Fipp told the Free Press earlier this year. “It was all these onside kicks We’d have these different alignments and a guy out wide and sometimes popping it over to that guy. But it was always, it wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, we’re kicking off because that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ It was always like, which is definitely this coach, he’s the guy, when you’re supposed to do A, then we’ll do B. When you’re supposed to do B, we’ll do C. And that was like his mindset all the time.”
Hernandez was La Jolla’s defensive coordinator and oversaw the kickoff team before eventually taking over as head coach. During Fipp’s time at the school in the early 1990s, La Jolla was so renowned for its special teams that then-USC assistant Kennedy Polamalu, now the running backs coach with the Las Vegas Raiders, once dropped in for a day of film study to pick Hernandez’s brain.
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The Vikings ran an assortment of onside kicks that Hernandez estimates led to a couple dozen recoveries during his coaching career and had one “crazy kickoff return” play that Fipp said he’s “always thought we should run that at some time in the league.”
High school rules then and now are much different than what Fipp is constrained by in the NFL, and Hernandez did his best to make sure La Jolla used every inch of the rule book and the field.
He shifted personnel on kickoffs, moving all but one player to one side of the formation, and ran an assortment of trick kicks off that. He kicked into the strength of the cover team and to the weak side, sending pop-ups to the gunner on the other side of the field. He floated kicks over the front line and challenged return men deep. And he studied his opponents’ personnel and knew when to take “shot” kicks at specific players.
“Sometimes they’d have these kids, they’d bring heavy kids on that front line a little bit, like I said, some of the kids just to (get them playing time),” Hernandez said. “And if we saw a kid that was a little bit too heavy-looking, we’d take a shot kick. (In practice) our kicker would set up trash cans on the other side, placing them where there would be a guy. And if he wasn’t too quick, it looked like, we’d kick the ball line drive and try to get a line drive off of them. Sometimes they weren’t fast enough to get out of the way.”
Fipp recovered at least one onside kick on a pop-up to the far side of the field. But after seeing limited time on defense his junior season, he told Hernandez, who was also his favorite teacher from middle school, he was thinking about giving up football to concentrate on pole vaulting, his best sport at the time.
Hernandez, who jokingly gave Fipp an award for being The Other Team’s Most Valuable Player at his junior year end-of-season banquet, encouraged Fipp to stick with the sport.
“I was all special teams my junior year, but when I went in on defense, it was like I gave up a touchdown late in the game,” Fipp said. “And he’d be like, ‘Yeah, you’re the other team’s most valuable player, every time we put you in there.’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this guy just did this to me in front of everybody.’ My parents were there.
“It was cold, but that’s how he was. He was an incredible motivator. And then the very next summer he’s coming to me saying, ‘I think you can be a hell of a football player.’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? You’re the same guy who said that.’ But he never pulled any punches, he always told you the truth, so you knew like, ‘Hey man, if this guy’s saying it. ...’ That’s why I said (last year) at one of these press conference, I said it’s amazing what a little belief in someone can do for someone, or having someone that believes in you can do. Because he did come to me and say, ‘Hey, I really think you can be a great football player and have a great season.’ And I was about to quit football.”
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Fipp played well enough his senior season to earn a preferred walk-on invite to Arizona, where Hernandez had sent a long string of standout defensive backs — including two who went on to become NFL assistant coaches, Jeff Hammerschmidt and former Green Bay Packers Pro Bowler Chuck Cecil.
At Arizona, Fipp arrived with modest goals — “My dream was to run down on one kickoff,” he said — and quickly played his way into a regular role on special teams. By the time he graduated, he was a starting safety and had found another coach, then-Arizona defensive coordinator Duane Akina, to emulate as he entered the profession.
“Between Coach Hernandez, Coach Akina and the energy of jogging out on a college football field that it gives you is just like, I want to be a part of this the rest of my life, and that was it,” Fipp said.
Fipp abandoned his plans to be a fishing or river rafting guide — something outdoorsy — and started his coaching career as a secondary and special teams coach at Holy Cross in 1998. He has coached special teams in one capacity or another for all 16 of his seasons in the NFL, was special teams coordinator with the Philadelphia Eagles for eight seasons before joining Dan Campbell’s inaugural staff in 2021, and with Campbell’s help has turned the Lions’ special teams into one of the NFL’s best, most feared units.
The Lions ranked top-three in both kick- and punt-return average last season. They finished sixth in Rick Gosselin’s composite special teams rankings, after finishing seventh in 2021. And in his two-plus seasons as coordinator, the Lions have converted eight of nine fake punt attempts, a stunning number in the typically conservative NFL.
“I know there’s a lot of guys on the team who don’t even see special teams at all and they, like, beg Coach Fipp to get on teams because that’s just the type of coach he is and he gets everybody excited to be on special teams,” linebacker Derrick Barnes said. “It’s not looked down upon here. Most people are, ‘Ah, I don’t want to play special teams.’ But here it’s very important and it has gotten us a long way, especially with Coach Fipp being our coach.”
Fipp credits Campbell for helping to bring out his aggressive side, and as head coach, it’s Campbell who signs off on the Lions’ fakes.
“When I sit in there and watch the film, I’m looking at all the rushes and he’s like, ‘Oh, rushes, that’s perfect. If they’re rushing us, we can do this, this, this,’” Fipp said. “The first thing he’s looking at is all the fakes off it and so, he’s an offensive coach. It’s really helped me being around him and seeing the game kind of through his eyes that way.”
In 2021, the Lions converted four of five fake punts, with C.J. Moore running for 28 yards on a direct snap against the Los Angeles Rams and punter Jack Fox completing three of four throws. Fox’s only incompletion came on a dropped pass by Godwin Igwebuike that would have gone for a first down.
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Last season, Moore ran for two more first downs and Fox completed his only pass, and in last week’s win over the Kansas City Chiefs, Jalen Reeves-Maybin — who replaced Moore as personal protector — ran for 3 yards on a fourth-and-2 fake punt when the Lions were backed up at their own 17-yard line.
The conversion keyed the Lions’ only first-half scoring drive and stunned observers for its brazenness.
“We’re really aggressive in all the phases,” Fox said. “We don’t take plays off, we want to make plays and guys just like playing when you go out there trying to win instead of going out there and not trying to (bleep) up.
“We’re aggressive and it’s fun to be aggressive.”
Of all the lessons Fipp learned from his time with Hernandez — how to weaponize special teams; how to attack mismatches; the concept of stealing an opponent’s practice time by giving them too much to prepare for; and the precision it takes to succeed — that might be the most important.
In a league that’s trying to legislate special teams out of the game, the Lions have made the kicking game fun again and must-see TV.
They’ve changed personnel on their punt team and where they attack on fakes; Reeves-Maybin ran up the middle, while Moore’s conversions came on sweeps. They’ve shown a willingness to run fakes and return punts from anywhere on the field. They kick off trying to force an opponent return. And long after the element of surprise is gone, they’ve continued to succeed.
“I would say that I am proud of that because I think there is something to that and I think that it’s one thing to go out there and run a bunch of fakes and I think people have done that in the past and they’re 50/50 and that’s really not good enough, in my opinion,” Fipp said. “It really all comes back to the players. When you’ve got players who are able to overcome and they make things right, no matter what the look is, they’re able to adjust and adapt and handle it, is really what it comes down to.
“I say there’s two types of people in life. There’s guys who have all the reasons for why it didn’t work out, it didn’t go there way and then there’s a group of guys that find ways to get things done, and ultimately, those guys have done that, which has been fun to watch.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him @davebirkett.
Next up: Seahawks
Matchup: Lions (1-0) vs. Seattle (0-1).
Kickoff: 1 p.m. Sunday; Ford Field, Detroit.
TV/radio: Fox; WXYT-FM (97.1).
Line: Lions by 4½.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Dave Fipp's HS coach sparked Detroit Lions' penchant for fake punts
