FanHouse Michael Koenen

Punters don't get franchise tags very often.

Actually punters don't ever get franchise tags. They're punters. They trot out, crank off a 45-yard punt (hopefully) then jog back to the sideline. With a surplus of punters usually being out on the street looking to work, they just aren't in that much demand.

But the Falcons are not ones to be conventional. Atlanta will become the second team to ever give its punter a franchise tag as they have announced that they are franchising Michael Koenen.

One of the lesser noticed aspects of the Falcons success this year has been the team's special teams play. Harry Douglas has proven to be a solid punt returner, while Jerious Norwood's speed make him a threat every time he returns a punt. And Jason Elam has missed only two field goals all season.

But the one you'll likely hear the most about this weekend is whenever the Falcons line up to punt, you'll hear the commentators mention how the Falcons gave up an NFL record 49 yards on punt returns all season. In 16 games, the Falcons allowed a total of 49 yards in punt returns. No opposing returner ever ripped off a return longer than 12 yards.To put it in perspective, there were 28 punt returns of 40+ yards this year and 119 punt returns of 20 yards or more. Atlanta allowed none of them. A league high 27 of Michael Koenen's 47 punts were fair caught.

But while all of that is true, this is truly a case of a junk stat. There's some value in the fact that Koenen's high arcing punts ensured that no team ever got a game-changing return. But at the same time, Koenen was only averaging 40.7 yards per punt, which was 34th out of the 35 NFL punters with 20 or more boots. His net average of 37.5 is 20th in the league.

So there are a lot of things to be impressed with about the Falcons special teams, but if you hear television commentators talk about how great their punting is, don't believe it. It's consistent, but the Falcons aren't winning the battle of field position.