Risk on special teams should make Dolphins think twice on Tyreek Hill, Jaylen Waddle | Habib

MIAMI GARDENS — Mike McDaniel has a point. Several, actually.

Special teams plays count just as much as any other in a game. They count for yardage. They count for points. And when you have two of the most dangerous players in the open field in Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle, it doesn’t require much brainpower to come up with reasons to use them as return men.

“Using our best players in the best situations for the team,” McDaniel said Wednesday.

McDaniel later went on to say “it’s always been confusing” why you would do anything else.

“Maybe you can explain it,” McDaniel said. “Why are special teams yards any different than throwing a screen?”

They’re not.

Didn’t say they are.

But special teams plays?

Completely different animal.

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That’s not me talking. That’s the NFL. The league studies this stuff and determined that punts produce a higher rate of injuries than other plays. If that’s not enough to raise your antenna, there’s more. Gunners and — here’s the key — punt returners run the highest risk on said plays. That’s what the league statistics show, and they certainly make sense. The head of steam players have on screens cannot be compared to them storming down the field covering punts.

Dolphins can't afford to lose Tyreek Hill, Jaylen Waddle or Jevon Holland

It should go without saying that if the Dolphins should lose Hill or Waddle or safety Jevon Holland (the third punt returner on the depth chart), it would be catastrophic. Yards are yards, as McDaniel likes to say, but players aren’t players.

McDaniel, whose options were limited when Lynn Bowden didn't make the team, said decisions on whom to send out as return men will be strategic, dependent on the flow of each game, the wind, field position and the score.

Uh … injury risk?

“Maybe there’s a hot team that is very, very, very hard to block and makes a ton of plays in coverage,” McDaniel said. “That’s a different story.”

It was during the league’s annual meeting at The Breakers in March that Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, gave the media a safety briefing in which he said the league is examining why punt plays have a “very high” injury rate, especially for return men trying to track a ball high overhead while large men ramble 40 yards downfield ready to tee off on them.

“Everybody’s really engaged in that conversation,” Sills said.

The last time the NFL traveled down a similar road, the result was why we don’t see many kickoff returns anymore.

To support his position, McDaniel cited the impact Devin Hester had on the 2006 Chicago Bears, who reached the Super Bowl. Counting the playoffs, Hester had six total returns for touchdowns that year.

“I don’t think there was an asterisk that it was special teams,” McDaniel said.

On a much lesser scale, we’ve seen the impact a speedy return man can have for the Dolphins, namely in the forms of Ted Ginn and Jakeem Grant. Nothing can get fans out of their seats like the lightning strike of a returner going the distance.

Hill's rookie year helped land him on All-Decade Team

There should be little doubt Hill, Waddle and Holland can do just that.

Hill, for example, led the NFL with 592 punt return yards and an obscene 15.2 average in 2016. That was Hill’s rookie year. The deeper he got into his career and the more the Chiefs figured out what they had in Hill, the less he saw of the return game. The final three seasons in Kansas City combined, he returned a total of just two punts or kicks, yet he had accomplished enough that he still was named to the NFL’s All-Decade Team as a return specialist.

Hill’s ability as a return specialist is legendary. In college, he once made a coach look silly. In the pros, he cost a player $100,000. A quick explanation:

• Hill was at Oklahoma State when Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops accepted a 5-yard penalty with a minute left and a seven-point lead. Given a second chance, Hill ripped off a 92-yard return in what turned out to be a 38-35 Oklahoma State overtime victory.

• A standard rule of thumb is not to field a punt inside your 10-yard line, a rule Hill does not subscribe to. That 15.2 average as a rookie was cemented when he returned a punt 95 yards for a score against the Chargers. By doing so, Hill raised his average from 13.1, leap-frogging the Vikings’ Marcus Sherels, who had a bonus clause in his contract if he led the league in return average. Sherels averaged 13.9.

Still, the Chiefs, like the Bears with Hester, found themselves having to balance Hill’s workload between offense and special teams, something McDaniel plans to keep in mind.

“You also have to weigh in, on both sides, how they’re being used, the upcoming series or the series we just had,” McDaniel said.

McDaniel needs only to look across the field Sunday for proof of the risk involved with special teams. Linebacker Raekwon McMillan is a backup on the Patriots. In 2017, he was a second-round pick of the Dolphins, the 54th player chosen. And in the first snap of his NFL career, he blew out a knee covering a punt in a preseason game. He played only two seasons in Miami. What his career could have been, we’ll never know.

“You have to trust your players to lean on each other and keep each other out of harm's way,” McDaniel said. “But yeah, every single play, every single snap, there's a huge risk for injury. That's the nature of the beast.”

Except some beasts are more dangerous than others.

Hal Habib covers the Dolphins for The Post. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Miami Dolphins risking Tyreek Hill, Jaylen Waddle on punt returns