Darrin Simmons on Bengals Punter Brad Robbins
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00:00 There's certainly a lot of room for improvement for sure.
00:03 He got off to about as rough a start
00:05 as you could possibly get into.
00:07 We were playing in the opener in Cleveland.
00:09 He punts 11 times.
00:10 It's in the rain.
00:12 And it's a difficult place to punt in the first place.
00:14 So I mean, he got off to-- it was about as--
00:17 historically, about the worst start you possibly could.
00:20 I think he evolved some.
00:22 I certainly think there's still a lot of meat
00:25 left on the bone for him.
00:28 If you go back and look statistically where his rookie
00:30 year was in comparison like what Kevin Huber's was,
00:32 it's still better.
00:34 And so I think I don't want to overreact here.
00:36 I think that's part of my job is to help develop him and make
00:40 him better.
00:41 And so I think he can do that.
00:43 I think he has the right mindset.
00:44 He's very open to things that we bring up
00:49 and techniques we might want to change a little bit
00:51 to help that production.
00:53 But it's certainly an area we got to get better at quick.
00:56 Is that a competition for him?
00:58 Yeah, I would like to think that.
00:59 I mean, any time you have competition,
01:03 I think it brings out the best.
01:04 That's the cliche thing.
01:05 But yeah, I would think so.
01:06 You've gone down the road with rookie punters
01:09 now two years in a row.
01:11 Is there something to be said for a veteran presence
01:13 in that competition?
01:14 That's more of a no-brainer rather than
01:16 an element to the deal.
01:18 Well, I think that it depends.
01:20 There's a lot of factors that go into that too.
01:22 There's a salary cap that we have to deal with.
01:25 And sometimes we don't--
01:27 in other years, we haven't had as much room to do that.
01:30 And we have a potential for some savings
01:34 there by going with the younger route
01:35 if they have a chance to develop.
01:37 I mean, it's easy to always say, yeah,
01:39 there's a veteran player that's available.
01:41 And that's easy for me to say too.
01:42 But sometimes that's not always feasible for our team
01:45 or what's best for our team.
01:46 So I don't know if that's where we're
01:49 going to put some of our free agent or salary cap capital
01:54 into a veteran player that way.
01:56 I don't know that's out of the mix
01:57 by any stretch of the imagination.
01:58 There are some guys out there who are potentially
02:00 going to be available that are very interesting that could
02:04 certainly help us.
02:05 I think it's just got to be an organizational decision on where
02:08 we want to move that money to.