Sunday’s regular season opener against the Cincinnati Bengals was the 158th game of Joe Cardona’s career in the NFL. Playing a position notorious for its anonymity, however, the New England Patriots’ long snapper rarely stood out to the casual observer over the last nine years.
Cardona averaged 1.8 tackles since joining the league as a fifth-round draft pick, and his number of bad snaps is probably in the single digits. There was little to report on him from an on-field perspective, which actually might be a good thing given that a long snapper’s name mostly only gets mentioned when things to wrong, fairly or not.