Darren Bennett played in the NFL for over a decade. For some, that doesn’t make him a footballer.
The 6-foot-2 Australian tells the story of when he was introduced to a great Green Bay Packers linebacker who asked him what position he played.
“I said ‘punter,’” says Bennett, who moved to the United States at the age of 29 after a successful career as an Australian Rules footballer.
“Oh well,” the two-time Super Bowl winner linebacker replied. “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 at all.”
Thirty years later, the attitude remains much the same towards one of the strangest positions in sport and the players used in the specific instance when a team kicked the ball away to clear their lines.
On average, an NFL game contains 153 plays, with a punter called for eight of them.
The players are only allowed to spend about three minutes on the field, which isn’t really a lot of time to get noticed – even if you’re a history maker.
“I walk into Baltimore and no one knows who I am,” says retired gambler 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 gamblers. They are one of the lowest paid positions in the sport and only one punter has ever been drafted in the first round.
Such is the anonymity that comes with the view that during the 2012 draft, a punter’s selection in the third round sparked disbelief and a leading American sports broadcaster delivered a message to the American people: “Punters are people too.”
That message quickly became a meme and was embellished with merchandise.
But even though people didn’t care, punting is changing.
During a game in the primetime Sunday night slot 10 years ago, Koch – inspired by Bennett’s Aussie Rules-style punts – transformed it.
But at the time, it seemed to the twenty million TV viewers as if he was just playing very, very poorly.
To understand what Koch did, you have to know what punting was supposed to look like.
In American football, kicking and punting are different.
Kicking refers to field goals and kickoffs, where the ball is kicked off the ground to score points or to start the game. Punting, meanwhile, refers to the act of a team giving back possession of the ball when a player kicks the ball from his hands as far as possible into the opponent’s half.
Traditionally, gamblers kicked ‘turnover balls’ that circled through the air – with the advantage of traveling further. The negative, however, is that the flight path is predictable and easier for the receiving player to catch.
“The philosophy of punting is – and it always has been – to kick the ball as high as possible so that your team can get down there and the returner can be forced into a fair catch,” says Randy Brown, kicking coach at the Baltimore Ravens.
A fair catch occurs when the player receiving the ball has the right to take the catch without interference, but once the ball is caught the ball is dead and he cannot attempt to gain any yards.
Koch’s Ravens faced 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 daring, so they decided Koch would intentionally miskick balls.
Koch pointed his hips one way and wanted to kick it left or right, but he cut across the ball and sliced it the other way. He hit “knuckleballs,” in which the ball, instead of spinning neatly through the air, wobbled erratically.
And, crucially, he would use the ‘drop point’, a technique used mainly in Aussie Rules football, and so far only in very specific cases in American football, where the ball tended to so be pointed out that he fell over. -end.
Balls would travel fewer yards, but gave the receiver less time to react and prepare his return.
And it worked.
Koch punted to Brown six times in that game, forcing four fair catches, while the other two punts were left alone to roll out of bounds.
“We told Sam, ‘put the ball on the ground as quickly as possible,’” Randy Brown said. “Instead of hitting a ball that has a five-second hangtime, our goal was to hit one with three and a half.
“What we did was completely against the grain.”
Koch adds, “It seemed like they were mishits and would captivate the audience, but we knew what we were performing.”
In an inch game, Koch’s stats improved by yards. Net distance is the defining statistic for a gambler. In 2013, Koch’s net distance was 38.9, a figure good enough for 22nd in the league. In 2014 this was 43.2, the best in the competition.
“It was very exciting,” Koch recalls. “We created something that is completely against the norm for how many years.”
For Brown, it was “a eureka moment.”
“If you’re going to introduce 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 either.” he says.
“This wasn’t a pre-season game. From a coaching standpoint, it was the confidence in the player to execute the skill on the big stage.”
Koch, who retired in 2022 after a 16-year career, had drawn inspiration from a number of sources.
The Aussie-style punt, previously used almost exclusively in conditions requiring a short-range punt, had been introduced to the NFL by Bennett in the 1990s and was used by one of Koch’s rival punters in the 2013 playoffs -2014. off.
But it was Koch who took it to the extreme.
“We have turnovers, liners, hooks, boomerangs, knuckles. And they all do different things,” Koch said in a 2016 interview with the NFL.
“A golfer wants to hit a draw. Well, I can let the ball pull toward the sideline, and once it reaches the sideline, it usually starts to slow down and descend, straightens out, and then lets it roll down that sideline.”
Previously, gamblers only needed a driver to succeed in the NFL. Koch made sure they needed every club in the bag.
Koch’s exploits not only had a technical impact on the NFL, but a demographic impact as well.
Australians now dominate punting 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 past 11 years.
Melbourne native Tory Taylor, 27, is in his first season of the NFL and is being tipped as a generational talent.
The success of Koch’s approach inadvertently led to the most fertile breeding ground for gamblers in the United States being on the other side of the world.
Aussie Rules players must hit all types of kicks in all types of situations, a skill now required in American football.
“In Australia we kick the ball to each other from the age of three,” Bennett explains.
‘When you see children in their backyard [in Australia]they don’t throw the ball to each other. They fall for it. We never throw it.”
In short, this is also why the same transfer from rugby to the NFL did not happen. Despite kicking being an established part of the sport, throwing is still the main form of passing, so the number of reps you can achieve with kicking is simply non-existent compared to Aussie Rules.
“American children learn to look at the ball when they kick,” says Bennett. “So they’re not aware of what’s going on, whereas Australians can look at the situation, make an adjustment and still get 75% of the point they wanted to get to.”
Training schools have been set up for prospective Australian gamblers, including Bennett’s own Gridiron Company, and ProKick Australia, which launched in 2007. ProKick has helped 260 of its alumni receive full scholarships to U.S. colleges.
The flow of Australian gamblers at the college level hasn’t quite been replicated in the NFL. In 2023, one in two of the biggest gyms had Australians as punters, compared to one in six teams last season in the NFL.
“We’re at the tip of the iceberg,” Brown smiles. “We’ve always wanted the ball to be hit in one direction, and now the Aussies have come and given us so many different angles and helped our game grow.”
The Australians’ success opens the minds of American soccer to what else is possible.
This season, Northern Ireland native Charlie Smyth made the switch from Gaelic football to place-kicker for the New Orleans Saints.
“We brought four Irish people for the specialist showcase,” says Brown. “I mean, wow. There are talented players all over the world – let’s go find them.
“I may be that guy who travels the world and finds specialists who can compete in the NFL. My wife would be very happy to travel the world with me and see guys kicking in Italy, Australia and Spain.
‘Forty years ago I read an article that if you want success in life, you have to be an expert in a field that no one else is.
“So am I one of the best to ever do this?” Yes, because I’m one of the few who has done that. There just aren’t enough of us in the lake. That’s just not there.’
However, thanks to Brown, Koch and Australia, the punter lake is growing.
