American football players are often stereotyped as big and dumb but... football is complicated. Often needlessly so. It takes extensive knowledge of the rules of the game in order just to figure out what's going on.
In this case, the rules say that if a kickoff is handled first by a player who has established themselves as out of bounds, a penalty is assessed and the ball moved to the 40 yard line. The intent is for a horribly miskicked ball to be penalized.
What you see is a special teams player knowing the rule, carefully and clearly establishing himself as out of bounds, and turning an excellently kicked ball at the one yard line into a ball 39 yards down field.
I’ve seen the commentators confused by this play before!
