Like his counterparts, “Mr. Wright” is an unsung standout and a top performer among NFL specialists.
Seated comfortably at a high-top table adjacent to the locker room inside Twin Cities Orthopedics Performance Center, the 25-year-old former UDFA reflected on 2025, a season full of personal highlights, with a punter’s humility — uninterested in tooting his horn or circling a specific moment as his favorite.
Wright is modest, the requisite trait for a person playing an oft-thankless position. He doesn’t gloat about his NFL season-long 77-yard punt versus Cleveland in London or his 65-yard “alley oop” at Dallas, which practically landed on rookie gunner Tai Felton’s heels and bounced to the Cowboys 3-yard line.
“I’m prouder of just the overall consistency and the performance that I’ve put in this year,” Wright said. “I’m a little bit smarter, my football IQ’s a little bit better, I understand the punt play a little bit better. And that’s just reps — having reps in the league and doing it at the highest level possible and just knowing what exactly I want to do with every single ball and having that supreme confidence to [do it].”
Wright’s in-season routine hasn’t switched up much from years past, he noted, but he feels like he is more homed in on the specifics of his job. He’s not cutting corners, or banking on his talent alone. He owns the complacency he showed after a strong debut 2022 season and now wants to master his craft.
“The potential was always there for this guy,” Special Teams Coordinator Matt Daniels expressed a couple of days after Minnesota’s win over the Cowboys, reiterating what he said near the start of Wright’s fourth season. “But I think the biggest thing [is] being coachable, having a growth mindset, trying to get rid of some old bad habits that we had — take the coaching and be able to run with it.
“Even looking back at his rookie year,” Daniels reflected. “The leg talent was there. There were just inconsistencies in his game, and so now he’s found a way to stack positive performances and build off that, which has really given him a ton of confidence to go in and perform at an elite level for us.”
Wright recalled dialogue with his coach/friend that was a harbinger of his breakout: “I mentioned to ‘Hat’ [this summer] I actually felt as strong as I did coming out of college for a change, which I think has really been helpful because I don’t have to put as much into a ball to get the result that I want anymore.”