How to Kick Field Goals With a Bad Snap (And Hold Saves)

The snap is low and skipping along the turf. What happens in the next one-and-a-half seconds decides whether your team gets three points, turns the ball over, or looks like a youth team running a special teams drill. Most kickers have never decided what they will do in that moment, which is why they do nothing useful — they freeze, or worse, they chase a kick that is not there.

Bad snaps are not rare. Ask any long snapper: over a season, a handful of balls go wrong, and when one does, the whole operation is improvising in real time. The fix is not talent. It is pre-decided protocols, drilled until the chaos has a script. Here are those scripts.

First, Know What You Are Protecting

Before the failure types, one rule above all others: never kick a ball that is moving badly. A kick off a skipping, bouncing or spinning ball is almost never a make and very often a disaster — a blocked kick, a live ball flying loose, a play your whole sideline will be explaining to you for a week. The instinct to salvage the kick is exactly what gets teams in trouble. Your job on a broken snap is to reset it if it can be reset, and to protect the ball if it cannot.

Remember also what a bad snap costs you in time. A clean operation runs in roughly one and a half seconds; the moment the snap goes wrong, that clock has already burned most of its cushion, and the rush is arriving. Every protocol below is built around that shrinking window.

The Four Failures and Your Response to Each

1. The high snap

This is the most recoverable failure, and it belongs to the holder. A good holder leaves his spot, catches the ball high with both hands, and gets it down to the spot while staying over his knees. Your job as the kicker is the hardest thing in this whole post: patience. Do not start your swing early because the snap looks late. Watch the ball, let the operation reset, and take your kick from wherever the new timing lands. The teams that lose high snaps are the ones where the kicker abandoned his timing and swung at a ball that was still moving into place.

2. The low or skipping snap

The holder’s job, and it is a hard one: get the ball off the ground and spotted before the rush arrives, or fall on it if he cannot. There is no shame in the second answer — a punting situation recovered at the line of scrimmage beats a scooped-and-swung disaster every time. As the kicker, your default here is to hold your position and be ready, not to dive into the pile. You are the last person who should be on the ground, because if your holder does get it spotted, someone still has to kick it.

3. The off-target snap

It arrives off the mark to one side. The holder adjusts sideways — this is exactly why holders practice spinning the ball to laces-out under imperfect catches — and your job is to recognize that your steps no longer line up. If the ball is spotted within reach of a normal approach, take the kick with your normal steps. If it is spotted far enough off that your plant would be wrong, step in, reset the operation if there is time, or wave it off. A rushed kick from a bad spot is the worst of the available outcomes.

4. The fumbled or rolling ball

The ball never got spotted. The decision is now tactical, not technical: is there time and protection to spot it and kick, or does the ball need to be recovered and the play ended? That call belongs to the holder and, at most levels, whoever is nearest the ball — not to the kicker chasing glory across the line of scrimmage. The highlight-reel versions of this play exist, and they are highlights precisely because they almost never work.

What Each Job Owns When It Goes Wrong

A bad snap is a unit problem, so the responsibilities need to be assigned before the season, not during the play:

• Snapper — his job after a bad snap is to block, because the rush is now unblocked and somebody has to buy a second.
• Holder — he owns the ball. Recover, re-spot, or fall on it, in that order of preference and only if time allows.
• Kicker — you own the decision to kick or to hold. Decide it by watching the ball and the clock, and never by the crowd’s noise.

Every person on that unit should be able to recite these assignments. If nobody has said them out loud in practice, your team does not have a plan — it has a hope. The standards that prevent most of these situations start with the snap itself, which is covered in what makes a snapper great.

Drill It Until It Is Boring

Protocols only exist if you have rehearsed them. Two sessions a month is enough to make this normal:

1. Scripted chaos: a coach or teammate delivers ten snaps, half of them intentionally bad in different ways. Score the unit on outcomes — salvaged kicks, clean recoveries, zero panicked decisions.
2. The re-spot race: time your holder from a bad snap to a clean spot. Get it under a target number and hold everyone to it.
3. The decision drill: mixed good and bad snaps, kicker calls “kick” or “no” before the ball is spotted. Wrong calls get reviewed on film, not punished — the point is calibrating judgment, not punishing honesty.

The whole design of the operation, and why each of the three jobs exists, is laid out in the snap-hold-kick breakdown, and the holder’s craft specifically is in how to hold for field goals. For the equipment and spotting details your holder is managing, the football kick holder guide rounds it out.

The Mental Piece Nobody Rehearses

A bad snap rattles you in a specific way: it breaks your rhythm right before the moment your rhythm matters most. The countermeasure is the reset you practice every day anyway — walk off the broken play at your tempo, one long exhale, back to the line, run the routine from the top. Treat the salvage attempt as a fresh kick, not a continuation of the disaster. Kickers who carry the broken snap into the re-kick miss the easy one; kickers who file it away and restart the sequence usually do not.

You cannot control whether the snapper has a bad day. You can control whether your unit has a plan when he does. Build the protocols, drill them until they are boring, and the next broken snap becomes what it should be — a play you have already rehearsed a hundred times.