The underappreciated Lobo has made an art out of long snapping, and although his role might not be glamorous, it's a football skill Joe Maese proves is essential

Steven G. Smith/Tribune

Joe Maese, the deep snapper for the University of New Mexico football team, goes through a workout at practice. Maese is rated as college football's top deep snapper and is expected to be chosen in the NFL Draft.

By Brad Moore
Tribune reporter

     For Joe Maese, the most gripping part of an NFL game isn't a 60-yard bomb or a game-winning drive -- it's watching the ball being snapped to the punter.
     "As soon as a punt comes on, I don't care what I'm doing," Maese says, "I run over to the TV and watch it.
     "To me, it's a fine art."
     To most football fans, a punt is a fine time to make a hike to the fridge.
     But Maese and his small legion of snapping fraternity brothers don't mind if nobody else can appreciate their craft. For snappers, anonymity is a virtue -- a silent sign of a job well done.
     That's why probably 99 percent of you have never heard of Joe Maese (pronounced my-ES-ay), whom one scouting service rates as the University of New Mexico's best football player when measured by aptitude for his position.
     So you also probably don't know that he's considered the best college punt snapper (better known in football lingo as long snappers or deep snappers) in the country.
     Before this season, Maese became the only college player whose sole duty is to snap to be invited to a postseason all-star bowl game. He'll showcase his obscure talent for heaving a ball between his legs at the Hula Bowl, which is set for mid-January in Honolulu.
     Long snapping is Maese's only job for UNM. It consists of running out on the field five to 10 times a game, snapping the football swiftly and accurately to the punter, trying to get in the way of the oncoming rush, then dashing 40 yards down field and occasionally getting in on a tackle.
     Next year at this time, that job description is expected to be paying Maese, a money-strapped senior walk-on, $193,000 a year, the current minimum wage for an NFL rookie and going rate for a first-year NFL deep snapper.
     "My high school coach told me if I kept at it and kept at it, someday I'd play in the NFL," says Maese, who started snapping as a high school sophomore in Glendale, Ariz. "I was always like, 'Whatever.'
     "But it's finally starting to come true."
     Maese, who is in his second season at UNM since transferring from Phoenix College, has caught the attention of NFL scouts with what's considered the fastest snap in the college football world.
     The average time it takes an NFL snapper to zing the football back 15 yards to the punter is around three-quarters of a second. Maese fires it back at an average clip of .65 seconds -- a 10th of a second faster.
     "The first snap I ever took from him, the laces (on the ball) burnt my fingers," says Cort Moffitt, a sophomore and second-year starting punter. "I dropped the first couple I took from him. I had an ace snapper in high school, but when I took my first snaps from Joe, I was thinking, 'Golly, this guy's good.'"
     When NFL scouts visit UNM practices and watch Maese snap, "They walk away from here with a look on their face, like 'Wow!'" Moffitt said.
     Maese snaps the ball so fast, UNM coaches relieved him of snapping duties for the field-goal unit. His balls traveled the shorter 7-yard distance too quickly for the holders.
     Maese not only snaps the ball back with missile velocity, says Moffitt, but also with laser-like accuracy.
     "It's right in the numbers every time," Moffitt says. "With Joe, I never have to stand back on my heels wondering if I'm going to have to jump one way or the other, or scoop one off the ground. I know it's going to hit me in the chest.
     "I'm going to miss him next year, that's for sure."
     Maese and Moffitt have teamed up for 110 punts over the past two seasons. Only two, both last season, have been blocked. They came in the last game, against Air Force, and were chalked up to missed blocking assignments, not bad snaps.
     "As a snapper, that's what you never want to hear -- that double-thud," says Maese, a pleasant 21-year-old. "That means bad news."
     The last year has brought mostly good news for Maese, a 6-foot, 235-pounder who also played defensive end in junior college. In addition to being invited to the Hula Bowl, he also has been ranked by one NFL scouting service as the 63rd-best college player overall in terms of ability to perform the duties of his position.
     He won't get taken anywhere near 63rd in the 2001 NFL Draft, but he is expected to get picked.
     Not too long ago, NFL teams would never use a roster spot, never mind a draft pick, on a player who just snaps. They would simply use a full-time offensive or defensive player, usually a tight end or offensive lineman, to moonlight as the snapper. But in this age of specialization, there's a new and profitable market for snapping specialists.
     Last year for the first time, there were three college snappers drafted -- all in the seventh and final round.
     "(Being drafted) was unheard-of when I was trying to break in," says Green Bay snapper Rob Davis, a six-year veteran who is considered one of the best in the business.
     Davis, who says he lives a dream "every time I walk on these NFL fields every Sunday," was cut four times in three different NFL camps and spent a short time in the Canadian Football League before sticking with the Packers.
     "I took the rough road and had to pound the pavement for years," Davis said in a telephone interview. "Now they're drafting snappers.
     "Obviously, I didn't get the publicity Joe (Maese) has gotten. But the more notoriety and respect this position builds, the better."
     Maese has gotten virtually all of his publicity on, believe it or not, Longsnap.com, a Web site designed to shed light on the obscure profession. Longsnap.com rated Maese the No. 1 college long snapper in the country.
     Kevin Gold, a labor and employment attorney by day, is the founder of Longsnap.com. He's the agent for Davis and Kendall Gammon, the snapper for the Kansas City Chiefs. Gold posts snapping tips from Davis and Gammon and writes a weekly notebook on news and tidbits concerning the overlooked profession.
     "Snappers don't get any notoriety, so I thought I'd give them some pub and work on a narrow segment of the business," Gold says. "I've focused all my energy over the last year on representing snappers. As far as I know, I'm the only one specializing in it."
     Gold says two-thirds of NFL teams now use one player solely as a snapper. Only four teams -- Denver, Detroit, Jacksonville and Tennessee -- divide the punt and field-goal snapping between two snappers, he says.
     More teams are also looking for competent rookies, Gold says, so they can pay them the $193,000 minimum, which helps free salary cap money to sign the true stars of the NFL. When a player has been in the NFL for five seasons, the minimum wage goes up to $440,000 a year.
     Although there's more snapping jobs to go around these days, no aspiring snapper should have delusions about endorsement contracts or autograph sessions.
     "You can't be a real egotistical guy being a long snapper," Davis says. "You're never really recognized unless you make a mistake. People think (snapping) is an automatic play that should never go wrong.
     "You can't be thin-skinned either. A lot of guys will joke around with you about having the best job on the team since they think you don't have to do a lot. But overall, I think they respect what I do. I've had some teammates try to snap and they find out it's not as easy as it looks."
     Looks, confused ones, is what Maese gets when strangers ask him about what he does for the UNM football team.
     "First, if I don't think they know much about football, I ask them if they know what a punt is," Maese says. "Then I explain that I throw the ball between my legs to the punter. At first, they look really confused, like I'm talking about rugby or something."
     Snapping the ball with speed and accuracy is the most important part of the position. But a snapper also must be strong enough to block. Maese seems to have that covered as well. In the offseason, Maese won the Lobos 2000 Beefmaster Award as the strongest player weighing between 226 and 250 pounds.
     Ben Bernard, Maese's high school coach and the person responsible for spawning Maese's snapping career, said Maese would snap "a couple hundred balls a day" in high school "and he always wanted to snap more." He also played offensive and defensive tackle for Mountain Ridge High.
     "This is something you hear all the time, but Joe's work ethic and his willingness to lift weights is outstanding," Bernard says.
     Phoenix College, where Maese snapped and played defensive end, agreed with Bernard. While there, Maese won the school's work ethic award and the Iron Bear Award for weightlifting.
     At UNM, it has been the same story. At the end of a week leading up to a Saturday game, Lobo players don't wear pads so as to minimize chances of fatigue during the game.
     "But Joe will bring his pads out and sit them under the tree," Moffitt says. "After we're done, he'll put his pads on and snap 30 or 40 balls so he doesn't get used to snapping without pads on. You'll see him out here with the heavy ball (a 30-ounce ball instead of a regulation 12-ounce ball), putting everything he's got into the net, hitting a little cone he sets up. And then he'll sprint 40 yards because he knows his job isn't done after the snap. That's the type of person Joe is.
     "He knows it's going to end up paying off for him. I wish him the best of luck. He deserves it."
     Every day, Maese says, he thinks about the NFL and "what I have to do to get there."
     "I'm really anxious to see what's going to happen after the season because I don't know what's going to happen," he says. "I'm just trying to take care of every aspect I can."

Steven G. Smith/Tribune

Lobo players (from left) Jon Oliver, Joe Maese and Brian Johnson headed back to the locker room after playing Northern Arizona at University Stadium on Sept. 23. Maese, who played on the defensive line in college, has only one job for the Lobos -- the snapper on punts.