Darren Bennett played for over 10 years in the NFL. For some, that doesn’t make him a footballer.
The 6-foot-5 Australian tells the story of meeting a tall Green Bay Packers linebacker, who asked him what position he played.
“I said ‘gambler’,” says Bennett, who moved to the United States aged 29 after a successful career as an Australian rules footballer.
“Ach,” replied the linebacker, a two-time Super Bowl winner. “You’re not even a real football player.”
“And he just walked away,” laughs Bennett, who spent most of his NFL career with the San Diego Chargers in the 1990s. “I had no credibility with him.”
Thirty years later, attitudes remain much the same towards one of the strangest positions in sport and the players used in the precise instance where a team sends the ball to clear its lines.
On average, an NFL game has 153 plays, and a bettor is tapped for eight of them.
Players can only spend about three minutes on the field, which isn’t really a lot of time to get noticed – even if you’re a story maker.
“I walk around Baltimore and no one knows who I am,” says retired punter Sam Koch, who played a franchise record 256 games for the Baltimore Ravens.
Of the 250 or so players drafted each year, maybe one or two are punters. It’s one of the lowest-paid positions in sports and only one punter was drafted in the first round.
The anonymity that accompanies this position is such that during the 2012 draft, the selection of a bettor in the third round was met with disbelief and a major American sports broadcaster delivered a message to the American people: “Bettors are too people “.
This message quickly became a meme and appeared on merchandise.
But even if people don’t care, the boats have changed.
10 years ago, during a Sunday night prime-time match, Koch – inspired by Bennett’s Aussie Rules-style punts – turned it around.
But at the time, the 20 million viewers had the impression that he was playing very, very poorly.
To understand what Koch did, you need to know what punting was supposed to look like.
In American football, kicking and punting are different.
Kicking refers to field goals and kickoffs, when the ball is kicked from the ground to score points or to start the game. Punting, on the other hand, refers to the act by which a team returns possession when a player kicks the ball with their hands as far as possible into the opponent’s half.
Traditionally, punters shot “turnover” balls that spiraled through the air – the advantage being that they traveled further. The downside, however, is that the flight path is predictable and easier for the receiving player to catch.
“The philosophy of punting is – and always has been – to throw the ball as high as possible, allow your team to get down there and force the punter to make a good catch,” said Randy Brown, coach of the team kicks. Baltimore Ravens.
A fair catch occurs when the player receiving the ball is allowed to make the catch without interference, but, once he is caught, the ball is dead and he cannot attempt to gain yards.
Koch’s Ravens were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers and one of their main attractions, Antonio Brown, was the best punt returner in the league.
The Ravens had to try something bold, so they decided to have Koch deliberately kick footballs.
Directing his hips one way, Koch would shape up to hit it left or right, but would cut the ball and cut it the other way. He was hitting “knuckleballs”: instead of making a clean spiral through the air, the ball wobbled erratically.
And, above all, it would employ the “drop-punt”, a technique mainly used in Australian football, and until now only in very specific cases of American football, where the ball tended to be kicked in such a way that ‘he turns around. -END.
The balls would travel fewer yards but would give the receiver less time to react and prepare for a return.
And it worked.
Koch threw to Brown six times in this game, forcing four good catches, with the other two punts left alone to go out of bounds.
“We told Sam, ‘Get the ball on the ground as fast as you can,'” Randy Brown said. “Rather than hitting a ball that has a five-second hang time, our goal was to hit one with three and a half.
“What we were doing was going completely against the grain.”
Adds Koch: “They would look like they were missed shots and the crowds would boo, but we knew what we were doing.”
In a game of inches, Koch’s stats improved by several yards. Net area is the defining statistic for a bettor. In 2013, Koch’s net square footage was 38.9, good enough for 22nd in the league. In 2014, it was 43.2, the best in the league.
“It was very exciting,” Koch recalls. “We have created something that is completely contrary to the norm for how many years.”
For Brown, it was “a eureka moment.”
“If you present something like that on a Sunday night in front of over 20 million people, you don’t want your player to be embarrassed and, as a coach, you don’t want to be embarrassed,” he says.
“It wasn’t a pre-season game. From the coach’s point of view, it was confidence in the player to execute his skills on the big stage.”
Koch, who retired in 2022 after a 16-year career, drew inspiration from several sources.
The Australian-style punt, which previously had been used almost exclusively in circumstances requiring a short-range punt, had been introduced to the NFL by Bennett in the 1990s and used by one of Koch’s rival punters during of the 2013-2014 match. offs.
But it was Koch who went to the extreme.
“We have turnovers, liners, hooks, boomerangs, joins. And they all do different things,” Koch said in a 2016 NFL interview.
“A golfer wants to hit a draw. Well, I can make the ball shoot toward the sideline, and then once it gets to the sideline, it usually starts to slow down and start its descent, it straightens up and then allows him to roll down that sideline.”
It used to be that bettors only needed one driver to succeed in the NFL. Koch argued that they needed all the clubs in the bag.
Koch’s exploits not only had a technical impact on the NFL, but a demographic one as well.
Australians now dominate punts in American football.
The Ray Guy Award, given to the best punter in college football, has been won by an Australian in eight of the last 11 years.
Melbourne-born Tory Taylor, 27, is in his first season in the NFL and is tipped to be a generational talent.
The success of Koch’s approach inadvertently led to the fertile ground for punters from the United States being on the other side of the world.
Aussie Rules players must successfully complete all types of punts in all types of situations, a skill now required in American football.
“In Australia, we kick a ball from the age of three,” Bennett explains.
“If you see kids in their backyard (in Australia), they don’t throw the ball. They hit it. We never throw it.”
In short, this is also why the same transfer from rugby to the NFL did not take place. Although kicking is a regular component of the sport, the primary method of passing remains throwing, so the number of repetitions achieved with kicking just isn’t there compared to Australian Rules.
“American kids are taught to look at the ball when they kick,” Bennett says. “So they have no awareness of what’s going on, whereas the Australians can look at the situation, make an adjustment and hit 75 per cent of the kick they were going to do anyway.”
Training schools have been established for aspiring Australian punters, including Bennett’s Gridiron Company and ProKick Australia, launched in 2007. ProKick has enabled 260 of its alumni to secure full scholarships to US universities.
The flood of Australian punters at the college level hasn’t quite been replicated in the NFL. In 2023, one in two major sports schools had Australians as punters, while last season in the NFL it was one in six teams.
“We’re at the tip of the iceberg,” smiles Brown. “We always wanted the ball to be hit one way, and now the Australians have come and given us so many different angles and helped us develop our game.”
The success of the Australians opens the mind of American football to what else could exist.
This season, Northern Ireland-born Charlie Smyth transitioned from Gaelic football to placekicker for the New Orleans Saints.
“We invited four Irish people to take part in the specialist presentation,” explains Brown. “I mean, wow. There are talented players all over the world – let’s go find them.
“I might be that guy who travels the world and finds specialists who can compete in the NFL. My wife would be very, very happy to travel the world with me and see guys play in Italy, Australia and Spain.
“40 years ago I read an article that said if you want to succeed in life, be an expert in something that no one else is.
“So, am I one of the best to ever do it? Yes, because I’m one of the only ones to do it. There just aren’t enough of us in the lake. There aren’t any just didn’t.”
But thanks to Brown, Koch and Australia, punting lake is growing.
