ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. -- On Oct. 11, New York Giants running back Cam Skattebo fumbled away a win. The Giants lined up in field goal range coming out of the two-minute warning in overtime. Any points would have won the game.
Washington Commanders defensive lineman Daron Payne had other thoughts. After Skattebo was hit in the backfield and had to use his forearms to shed a tackle, he couldn't get the ball back up to his chest. Payne threw his blocker out of the way and threw his fist at the daylight between Skattebo and the football. Ball out. The Giants' chance at a win was erased, and the game ended in a tie.
Payne executed an increasingly popular -- and violent -- maneuver called the "Peanut Punch," wherein a would-be tackler throws a haymaker at the football in an attempt to pop it loose rather than wrapping up the ball carrier -- a technique popularized around 2012 and named after former Chicago Bears defender Charles "Peanut" Tillman.
One day later, Buffalo Bills running back James Cook III fell victim to the same fate.
Carrying from the Los Angeles Rams' 22-yard line early in overtime, Cook squeezed the ball low, around the left side of his abdomen. Had Cook had the ball higher, the incoming punch from linebacker Nate Landman might have left a bruise, but the ball wouldn't have had anywhere to go.
With the ball at Cook's side, Landman found a crease between Cook's armpit and wrist and wedged the ball through. Ball out. Rams possession. Had it not been for a blocked field goal minutes later, Cook's fumble would've meant Bills defeat.
But with fumbles come consequences.
Though the Giants didn't explicitly call it a benching, Skattebo didn't receive any carries the week following his fumble. And despite Cook being the NFL's reigning rushing leader, Bills coach Joe Brady threatened punishments -- including decreased playing time if Cook didn't clean up his ball security.
The NFL does not track punch attempts or their success as official statistics, and punches are almost impossible to track given the way defenders wield their arms while going for tackles, but it's clear that some of the NFL's best and most reliable ball carriers struggle with it.
Since the start of the 2025 season, including the playoffs, Cook has fumbled 11 times to lead all running backs, a rate of once for every 44 carries. Skattebo, while not as prolific in total rushes, fumbles once every 40 carries.
Defenders are punching at the ball nearly every drive, and being labeled a ball security risk makes you a target. The more you fumble, the more opponents try to make you fumble. As Brady puts it, every team the Bills play will have on the scouting report to punch at Cook.
So as Cook and the fumble-prone Bills (6-1) prepare for their matchup against the Minnesota Vikings (6-1), who led the NFL in forced fumbles in 2025, let's examine the Peanut Punch's popularity, why it works, what offenses can do to counteract its effectiveness and what the state of ball security is in this ever-changing league.
Countering the Peanut Punch
Offenses know how to prevent the punch. The technique exists.
Carry the ball "high and tight," squeezing it across your chest diagonally at an incline.
One point of the ball should be in the crook of your elbow.
The other point needs to be somewhere between your chin and your opposite shoulder.
Apply pressure with your fingertips, bicep, forearm and rib cage.
Lower your pads.
Make sure your wrist is always above your elbow.
Make sure there's no air between the ball and your body.
Make sure the ball isn't visible from behind.
And when you sense contact coming, think "double in trouble" and brace by crossing your off-ball hand over your on-ball wrist.
Catch him if you Ken 😮💨 @Kenneth_Walker9 https://t.co/Y0rfcUouXl
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) September 29, 2026
The technique works, but ball security is a lot like darts. Darts isn't difficult because no one's cracked the mystery of how to throw a bulls-eye. It's tricky because there's a huge gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it with precise consistency every time.
The punch has been more successful because carrying a football properly defies basic human instinct. We don't pick up speed by tucking our arms into our ribs. We don't change direction with our wrists above our elbows. And we don't fall to the ground without using our hands.
As long as ball carriers are human, there's always going to be a sliver of daylight for defenders to punch at.
"You've got to realize you've got the baby in your hands," former All-Pro running back Jamal Lewis told ESPN. "You've got the game in your hands. You've got the play in your hands when you're carrying the football. It's really just understanding that this is not a natural running style."
'High and tight'
Lewis fumbled 22 times in his first three full seasons. He wasn't alone. Over the same four-year span (Lewis missed the 2001 season with a knee injury), Giants stalwart Tiki Barber fumbled 35 times.
Reflecting on that period, Barber told ESPN he didn't think he had a ball security problem. A newspaper reporter actually tipped Barber off to just how frequently he'd been putting the ball on the ground, and it wasn't until 2004 when coach Tom Coughlin arrived in New York when Barber started to foresee consequences.
"Coughlin comes in and he says 'Tiki, you're a great player, but if you keep fumbling you're not going to play,'" Barber said.
So Barber and running backs coach Jerald Ingram went into the lab. "High and tight" became Barber's entire life. Anywhere he went, he had a football high and tight. On the treadmill. In the meeting room. Walking to the cafeteria.
He instructed teammates to try to rake the ball away from him any time, anywhere.
"It ultimately became second nature, so when I got in the games I wasn't even thinking about it anymore," Barber said. "You know what's interesting is I've been retired for 20 seasons now, but whenever somebody throws me a football, the first thing I do is put high and tight. It's so ingrained in my mind, I can't not do it."
After fumbling once every 27 carries from 2000 to 2003, Barber fumbled just once every 112 carries from 2004 to 2006, making the Pro Bowl all three years and twice leading the league in scrimmage yards.
Lewis noticed. Sometime after his 2,000-yard season in 2003 with the Baltimore Ravens, Lewis says he saw a TV special about Barber's adherence to the high-and-tight lifestyle and adopted it as his own. After fumbling once every 46 carries from 2000 to 2003, Lewis only fumbled once per 90 carries for the rest of his career.
All these years later, Lewis is still such a believer in the importance of high and tight that he scours the internet for proof of its efficacy. Lewis says he was watching footage of current Ravens running back Derrick Henry's workouts before the 2025 season and felt Henry was pumping the ball too much when he ran. Henry fumbled in each of that season's first three games.
This year, Lewis says he saw more of a high-and-tight ball security emphasis in Henry's offseason workout footage. Through nine weeks, Henry fumbled once only in 175 carries.
Punch specialists
The Bears drafted Tillman in 2003, but his patented punch didn't become well-known until 14 years ago this week when Tillman forced four fumbles in the same game. What's standard practice today barely existed during Barber's and Lewis' heydays.
Today's ball carriers have to contend with punch specialists on just about every defense. In Baltimore, there's Marlon Humphrey. In Atlanta, there's safety Jessie Bates III, who seems to jar a ball loose every weekend. In San Francisco, there's All-Pro linebacker Fred Warner, who led the league with four forced fumbles through the season's first seven games and is even more renowned for forcing fumbles in practice.
WILD PLAY IN TAMPA. Falcons ball ‼️ ATLvsTB on FOX/FOX One Stream on @NFLPlus https://t.co/UAdViWPcho
— NFL (@NFL) November 1, 2026
"I think obviously they all understand what it requires to protect the ball anytime they're practicing against me," Warner said, "which in turn is obviously going to make it easier on game day when they're out there having to try to protect the ball."
Aware of this truth, teams like the Bills put scout team defenders in jersey numbers belonging to players like Humphrey, Bates and Warner and instruct those players to punch more liberally than normal to simulate in-game conditions.
Defensive coaches crave the punch too. Falcons defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich remembers a time when he was on staff with the New York Jets when Tillman came out to conduct a Peanut Punch presentation.
Bates says the emphasis on the punch has grown significantly over his nine-year career. It's been incorporated into early-practice turnover drills, just as much a hallmark of training as tip drills and deflection drills. And it's not a one-size-fits-all exercise. Bates says there are different punching techniques depending on whether you're behind the ball carrier (called an ambush) versus if the runner has the ball in transition.
Titans cornerbacks coach Tony Oden, who was also on those Jets staffs, is so Zen about coaching the punch that he teaches players to punch with their eyes, not their fists.
"You punch it with your eyes because to see something, you have to look at it," Oden continued. "It can't be a blind punch. You punch with your eyes, your hand's going to follow. You try to punch the air behind the ball. A lot of times you think about just punching the ball.
"The ball's a big surface. Punch the middle of the ball, you don't hurt your wrist and those kind of things. You punch the air behind the ball [adjacent to the ribs] because that's the sweet spot."
Bills running backs coach Kelly Skipper says the Peanut Punch is "all you see" on film these days. Bills back Ty Johnson says he gets punched every time he carries the ball, so much so he barely notices anymore.
San Francisco linebacker Dre Greenlaw was recently fined $12,537 for an errant Peanut Punch attempt that clocked Falcons receiver Drake London in the helmet. In response to the incident, Greenlaw bluntly says: "I ain't punching no more."
But even if the ball isn't coming out and on occasion a missed punch could mean a penalty, fine or touchdown, defenses are confident the body blows add up.
"They have to make a decision in traffic," Oden said. "Sometimes it slows them up a little bit in regards to fighting for extra yards. If they know you have a potential or mindset of attacking the ball, when they protect it a little bit, the feet stop, they don't get as many leaky yards."
Leveling the playing field
Per ESPN Research, there were more fumbles per carry among running backs through the first eight weeks of this season than any since 2016. But that stat might overplay the Peanut Punch's effectiveness.
In 2025, NFL teams fumbled 536 times. That's by far the fewest number of total fumbles in any season since the AFL-NFL merger (1970). The only other season with fewer than 600 fumbles was 2020 (597). The rate of team fumbles per game has decreased steadily every decade in the Super Bowl era, with 2025 being the first time that teams fumbled less than once per game.
Discounting QB fumbles, in 1975 there was one fumble for every 21 run plays. By 2005, it was one fumble per 33 run plays. In 2025, that rate cratered to one fumble for every 51 rush attempts.
"If I had played in this era where guys are punching at it, I wouldn't worry about it," Barber says. "I worried more about these massive linemen and linebackers who would be stripping the ball away from me. They'd grab my hand basically breaking my wrist and then it's like 'I can't hold onto the ball because you're just stronger than me.'"
Cook led all non-quarterbacks with six fumbles last season. In 1975, there were 23 non-quarterbacks who fumbled six or more times -- with teams playing 14 games per season back then.
The Jets' Braelon Allen had been one of the NFL's best running backs since taking over for an injured Breece Hall in Week 4. In the five-game absence, he had the second most rush yards behind Tampa Bay's Bucky Irving, but even he was caught by the punch Sunday. Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Nick Bolton was able to jar the ball loose, causing Allen to lose his first fumble of the season, and only second since being drafted in 2024.
Beautiful punch out by Nick Bolton 👊 NYJvsKC on CBS/Paramount+ Stream on @NFLPlus https://t.co/jU3b1LtwgY
— NFL (@NFL) November 8, 2026
"Since I've been in the league to where I am now, every year it's more and more emphasis on getting the ball out," Titans running back Tony Pollard said, pointing at the paradox of the numbers. "It feels like making the tackle is secondary to punching it out. You can notice that a lot. A lot of guys, they rather get the ball out than secure the tackle."
The sacrifice of running with the ball high and tight is that it can make it harder to cut. Quick lateral movement is almost impossible without moving your arms. But Barber says tighter arm swings also lead to choppier steps which made him feel faster, and lower pad level made him run more powerfully.
Defenders have to make trade-offs too. While it's most common for the punching defender to be a pursuit player trailing a play, it's becoming more common for defenders to go for a punch before the runner has been wrapped up. That leads to arm tackles and opportunities for ball carriers to win with power.
Consider a fourth-and-1 play the Bills ran in Week 8 versus Baltimore. Cook received a pitch on a speed option. Ravens safety Malaki Starks wrapped Cook up with one arm behind the line to gain. Linebacker Roquan Smith came flying in, fist out, to finish the play. Cook saw Smith coming, squeezed the ball high and tight under his chin and slapped his off-ball hand over his wrist for protection.
Smith's punch connected wrist to ball. The ball barely moved. Cook kept churning his legs and stretched through the would-be tacklers for a first down. Textbook. From double-in-trouble to safe with a new set of downs.
Again, there's no mystery to beating the punch. It's just a pain in the hand, wrist, forearm, chest and sometimes neck to deal with.
To a running back, that's just part of the job.
"The next play," Barber concludes, "is always more important."
NFL Nation reporters Ben Baby, Nick Wagoner, Turron Davenport and Marc Raimondi contributed to this report.