2026 Gophers Position Previews: Special Teams

Summer days are getting shorter. Football is coming. To make you the fan at your tailgate most informed on the top, middle, and bottom of Minnesota's depth chart, Ski-U-Blog is previewing each position group on the roster. We move now to a much-changed special teams unit.

Likely Starters

The departure of Koi Perich leaves a hole in the defensive backfield but also one in Minnesota's return game. Sure, Perich muffed the ball, including to disastrous effect at Cal last season, but he was one of the country's most explosive return men. There is not a player on this roster likely to match him in that regard.

There is, though, one player who has recorded return yards as a Golden Gopher, someone who will have an important part in the offense this season. That's right — it's Pierce Walsh!

Alas, returning kicks and punts will not be among Walsh's jobs. Probably.

The most obvious candidate to take over kick returns is T.J. Thomas. In two years at Elon, Thomas never scored a special teams touchdown — and only once made it past midfield — but was a highly efficient, occasionally dangerous return man.

Click to enlarge.

More than two-thirds of Thomas' kick returns made it to at least the 25-yard line. It is hard to find a benchmark for comparison, but around 8 years ago, national kick return success rates were roughly 45 percent. Perich and Cam Davis, the two Gophers who returned kicks by design last year, gained the 25-yard line just one-third of the time. (One return that made it to the 30 was pulled back for holding, but it does not dramatically change the numbers to count it as a success or as a failure.)

If incoming special teams coordinator Daniel Da Prato can create lanes for his new returner, Thomas promises to provide much more consistent field position than his high-upside predecessor. And every once in a while, he'll use his vision, agility, and quickness to start the offense a bit farther downfield.

The second kick returner is harder to pick. A.J. Turner had three returns in his time at Marshall, and his explosiveness makes sense back there. My preferred pick is Ryan Estrada, the 4-star blazer from El Paso. Since he is fourth in line at tailback, this is an easy way to get Estrada some touches early in his college career.

Other than Thomas, Noah Jennings is the only player on the roster with college experience returning punts, taking seven at Charleston Southern in 2024. Only three gained more than a small handful of yards. Two combining for 80 yards were in a game against Eastern Illinois that is not on YouTube, so I do not have any way of viewing them. On the third, Jennings gained 15 yards before fumbling away the ball to Florida State. And again, all three were two years ago — Jennings never returned a punt or kick at Cincinnati. We have minimal idea how he will fare.

When I started writing this post, the kicking situation was pretty simple: Former Major League Soccer goalkeeping prospect Beckham Sunderland seemed to have the edge over redshirt freshman Daniel Jackson for the job of placekicker, if not kickoffs as well. Sunderland handled the latter at Michigan, and he converted an extra point while playing for Da Prato at Texas State. Jackson cameoed in the Northwestern State game with two successful PATs and three kickoffs (one of which went out of bounds).

Neither has a big résumé, but sometimes, that's how things go: Before Ryan Santoso or Emmit Carpenter or Dragan Kesich attempted a field goal in college, they had never attempted one. When most teams use only one kicker, it is hard for anyone to gain live reps before ascending to the main job. Specialists frequently lack experience when they become starters. Sunderland and Jackson could only gain experience by kicking in games.

Since the start of camp, though, the Gophers have added two kickers, each evidently supplanting the others on the depth chart.

The injunction various Class of 2022 athletes (including Gopher men's basketball's Cade Tyson) won against the NCAA in July gave a number of football players a chance to play one more season. The only player on Minnesota's 2025 roster to benefit from the injunction was Brady Denaburg, last year's starting kicker.

With Minnesota, Denaburg was basically the same player he was at Syracuse: perfect on PATs, solid on short kicks, and woeful anywhere past 40 yards. Beyond 40, he was just 2-for-7, and he now owns a woeful career mark of 31.3 percent at that range. With no NFL prospects and a newly awarded year of eligibility, Denaburg rejoined the team. He took the bulk of field goal attempts at their August 20 open practice.

While the process that led to Denaburg's addition may have been convoluted, the result was itself straightforward: Eligible player uses eligibility, seemingly retakes starting job he previously held.

However, the changes kept coming: Thanks to a lawsuit separate from (but surely inspired by) Wisne v. NCAA, 16 more football players received a restraining order against the NCAA granting them a fifth year of eligibility on August 19.

That included Luke Drzewiecki, who on August 21 transferred to the U of M. Drzewiecki, 2nd on New Mexico's all-time leading points list, participated in May minicamp with the Ravens but did not make any NFL training camp roster. He therefore was not busy and could go back to his old coordinator at UNM, Da Prato, and become the presumptive starting kicker for Minnesota.

Literally hours after Drzewiecki's transfer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit granted a stay on the lower court's decision in Wisne v. NCAA. This essentially revokes that fifth year for players from the Class of 2022, at least temporarily, making Denaburg ineligible again.

For now, Drzewiecki remains eligible because his case is in a different jurisdiction, and the NCAA has not appealed that one. In that case, we will operate as if he will play.

In four years at New Mexico, Drzewiecki (pronounced "driz-WICK-ee) converted 120 out of 122 extra-point attempts (98.4 percent). He did not take kickoffs his last season, so one of Minnesota's other kickers will probably have that responsibility.

He hit more than three-quarters of his career field goals, but field goal conversion percentage is a bad statistic because it does not account for distance. Instead, using a formula derived from Bill Radjewski's 2023 post on kicker efficiency, we should compare Drzewiecki's output against what we would expect from the average college kicker. Here is a table breaking down his conversion rates by range:

Est. xPts are produced from the following formula:

y = -0.001x^2 + 0.026x + 2.7081

Where the distance of each field goal attempt is x.

As you can see, despite his overall accuracy, Drzewiecki produced nearly dead-average value on field goals for the Lobos. While he is excellent at short range and fine up to 44 yards, he did not get many opportunities to take longer kicks and has never converted from beyond 47 yards. He should therefore expand the Gophers' range past Denaburg's capabilities, but it may still be an open competition for who will kick from 50-plus. P.J. Fleck once again has reason to be aggressive on 4th downs close to midfield.

There is considerably less ambiguity and change at punter, where Tom Weston returns as the starter. Across a variety of stats, Minnesota's punt unit was squarely in the middle of FBS: 71st in raw yards per punt (42.6), 78th in net yards per punt (38.6), 72nd in touchback rate (6.2 percent), 60th in return rate (26.2 percent). They rank lower in yards allowed per return (100th; 10.6), but that is skewed a bit by one bad day against Iowa's Kaden Wetjen, the best returner in America last year. While the Gophers will want better and have ample room to improve, Weston and his coverage team have been entirely adequate.

In his two-year Minnesota career as long snapper, Alan Soukup has two assisted tackles, two All-Big Ten honorable mentions, and a fumble recovery at Northwestern:

Soukup is pretty much cemented in place for three more seasons.

Key Backups

Javon Tracy, Jalen Smith, and Quayd Hendrix were behind Jennings in line at punt returner at the open practice. One of them, presumably, will get at least a couple chances to field a punt this season. Braiden Stevens would be in the mix if not for an injury.

Zachary Robbins joins the Gophers as a punter, but the true sophomore actually spent last season as Utah State's kickoff specialist. Pending various legal processes, Robbins may therefore be somewhere between the third- and fifth-string placekicker. For now, he is just Weston's backup.

Snapper Jacob Lutz sat his first year on campus and is likely to sit for a while longer. It would be a surprise to see him play.

Notables Unlikely to Contribute

Others who warmed up with the kick returners at the open practice: Hayden Moore, Grant Washington, and Zion Steptoe. They have zero college kick or punt returns between them.

Luke Ryerse, Grant's brother, is the third punter. He posted a 4.27 ERA over 25.1 innings with the Minnesota baseball team this spring, so he does get playing time for a Gophers team.

Having three punters means also having three holders, of course. The identify of the team's emergency specialists is always a mystery more hypothetically fun than actually fun to have solved.