Aussies in Football | The Greatest Anomaly In Sports History

across the land of sports many other cultures have influenced the games that they are played whether it's a unique set of roles like Canadian football or to how we've adapted fencing from the Egyptians to the sport it is today by a conglomeration of efforts from people around the world to find the most effective tactics available it is rare however for a sport to be played in a completely different country exclusively to have an impact on another unrelated sport played once again in a separate country almost exclusively for most cases it's hard to even imagine how this would be possible but as soon as I mention this most people that live and exist in the same sphere of influence as I do immediately jumped to one of the greatest sporting phenomenons in modern history the connection between Australians rules footy and American football to begin understanding how this happened let's first break down a Pacific position in football the punter a seemingly small Cog in a larger scheme of this game his job is very Niche and it's when a team fails to convert a third down conversion given the right circumstances they kick the ball to the opposing team as far as you can to start the drive preferably on the opposite side of the field so your defense can make a stop and get the ball back this is arguably one of the most important plays in a game of football because it often represents 40 to 50 yards of field position every time this play happens which is a stat that can't be attributed to any other play in the game heck it's such a powerful play that some teams in the 40s even tried punting on first down just to maximize his field position but this turned out to be a bad stat it's just used to prove the point that this was a very powerful play just looking at this year though the difference between having the best punter in the National Football League by net average compared to having the worst punter in the National Football League by net average means you'd be starting nearly 10 yards closer every single Drive which is a sizable difference the traditional American style of Punt is what we like to call a spiral right you'd catch the ball you'd walk straight down the field to where you're trying to kick the ball to and just generally kick straight up beneath the ball causing it to roll off your foot and look like a spiral or for those who can't imagine that a pass like many have stated this is the best way to get a combination of distance and hang time but due to the intense Precision required to hit the exact spot on your foot to make the ball spiral it does have consistency issues and due to the wild spiraling nature it also has some slight accuracy issues as that ball could fade One Direction or the other and it's very hard to control for years NFL punters have worked on perfecting this straight-on style of punting and have gotten incredibly far with it I mean think about this back in 1940 semi-ball was able to set a record of 51.4 yards a punt and that record stood for 83 years until just this year it was broken by Ryan Stonehouse so clearly it's a style that we're still trying to perfect but in the midst of our attempt to perfect this style there was another Force working maybe not against these efforts but definitely not parallel let me introduce you to Darren Bennett you see Darren was also an NFL punter but his style was a bit different he didn't hit every ball in a traditional file in fact for the first time in NFL history he brought something new to this position he brought this thing called the drop plant it's where you bring the nose of the ball down so you're hitting it at a slight angle instead of straight up and down when you kick it and instead of it spiraling it spins sort of like a saw blade to the air his combination of massive leg power and seemingly ethereal control over the ball was something we had never seen before at this league earning him multiple Pro balls and even making him to the all-decade team but unlike most other people on these lists he hadn't been playing football his whole life heck his resume only includes the game of American football that he played at the professional level meaning he never played in high school or college which is a typical American route and the other difference between Bennett and everybody else on the all-decade list he was the only Australian this level of play was not the last we'd see of Australians playing American football far from it actually as they begin to trickle down first with Nathan Chapman going next in the NFL then Matt mcgreer Ben Graham and savraka all making their Splash in the league and Aussies would sprinkle in and out of the league here and there always had pretty decent levels of success things would really bust open in America though after one fateful year 2013 the year Tom hornsey won the ray guy award the award given to the best punter in college football then in 2014 and 2015 you had Tom Hackett 2016 went to Mitch wisnowski in 2017 went to Michael Dixon and you better believe the one thing these guys all shared in common was their home country of Australia now if a five-year run at the best punter of college football coming from a single country doesn't light a fire under coaches butts then I don't know what would so now you must be wondering what the heck were the boys doing down under well you see when that first group of Australians that went pro got done in the NFL they didn't simply just return home to plant Gardens and breed kangaroos they came with the knowledge of how to dominate American football and they wanted to bring it to the young Lads back home which started out with a little program called Pro kick Australia which was founded in 2007 by you guessed it Nathan Chapman the second Ozzie who played the NFL now you think well just because a former NFL punters teaching Aussies how to kick it can't make them that much better than Americans because heck we have former NFL punters here in America and we're not dominant like that so there's got to be something else right and yes you would be correct something that's been around for much longer than Michael Dixon Nathan Chapman or Darren Bennett to understand why they were so dominant we have to look all the way back to the 1850s where our game was slowly being crafted with similar rules to rugby known as Australian Rules Football you see the Australian timeline of evolution of the game soccer or football is a little bit different than everywhere else it never really got to the point where we are passing the ball as much as we are in American football and it had similar rules to rugby has its one continuous game not broken up by individual plays but instead of tossing it to teammates like in rugby you could kind of just punch the ball with your hand or even kick it yes kick it now watching a game of AFL it becomes very apparent what this sport had evolved into yes its own unique entity but if you're an American football coach watching this you're looking at a literal breeding grounds for punters you're telling me I can watch athletic physical players run around and then in the most intense circumstances kick the ball with high levels of precision sometimes as far as 50 to 60 meters away while not being afraid of collisions and able to make tackles or even run the ball if need be now for those of you who don't understand why this is such a promising thing to look at during the 80s to early 2000s America was having its own problems with punters the more we focused on specializing the spiral punt the less we focus on other things like physicality athleticism and punting as a whole was starting to get a bad rap as the unathletic guys who became too good at their jobs to replace but were a liability under any other circumstances this is what made Australians so appealing because not only did they come over just upon they came over to change the entire sport by opening up the playbooks of special teams coordinators now instead of pawning from the pocket with the Australians there was an entirely new style of putting that was popularized in colleges often known as the rollout or rugby style I like to refer to it as the read option of punting you see their first read is to check and see if they're bringing the appropriate amount of pressure and keeping their eyes on you if that's true then they are doing all that then you're gonna hold on to the bomb and if they're not coming hard or coming at bad angles you just take off and run with it this made guarding Australians extremely difficult because they weren't just legitimate threats as punters but they were legitimate threats as Runners as well if you didn't bring the right pressure on top of that their second read is that if you didn't bring the appropriate amount of pressure they were liable to hold the ball long enough that your punt returner was going to be catching it in a Congregation of players known as the opposing punt coverage team this is how players like Adam korzak were able to go entire Seasons forcing negative 11 return yards on the season special teams coordinators still don't have good answers for that style of punting Australians are bringing because even when you dial up the heat on them Australians have been used to punting under that level of pressure because it's just the previous sport that they played so we've gone almost a decade now of pure Australian domination at the Collegiate level which may lead many to wonder why their impact hasn't been as great in the NFL ranks as it has been in college I mean aside from pretty much Michael Dixon many of the others coming out of college football haven't had nearly as much of success at the Aussies at all who are dominant in the early 2000s and the answers for this shows just how intertwined these two supports are you see in the 60s and 70s the main way ozzies took shots on the goal was this thing called a flat putt essentially a knuckleball meant to fly straight towards the Target and then mix this in with some actual drop kicks now it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell that this is not the primary style of punting that we were doing here in the America so it didn't necessarily translate but when we go going to the 80s and 90s when Derek Bennett and Nathan Chapman and savraco were all growing up and learning the game the popularity of the drop pump was taking off in position players as they were often asked to take those shots from 40 to 60 meters out had developed a much different technique than those before them this would allow them to hit drop punts or on occasion go for the barrel or torpedo punt which would be canonized in American lingo as a spiral from extreme distances Bennett was even noted to hit an 80 meter torque for a goal of one point pretty much the only way to hit the ball like this with this much strength and consistency is to have a long fluid swing to allow your body to get through the ball as much as your leg did looking at still frames of Bennett's swing you can actually see similarities to many of the other American greats like Ray guy himself Reggie Roby and other punters of that time but as Sports typically do even this style in Australia would change with the position players taking significantly less lengthy shots at the goal and focus more more on short passes and as this kicking style changed in Australian Rules Football we began to see a punting style change in America a miraculous one-to-one change as the long flowing swings of old were being replaced with short jab-like swings seen by Tom Hackett Michael Dixon and Adam korzak the style of play is insanely effective at the Collegiate level though hence the Aussie takeover but it has struggled to find the same consistency at the pro levels but the gameplay style from hitting longer punts to much shorter quicker punts under higher pressure can be seen being reflect in how ozzies punt from hitting deep booming punts to running and letting pressure come to them and then getting off a pawn away from the returner with just enough Hang Time the force a fair catch so all in all from punting schematics to punting techniques all the way down to how the defending teams must defend the punt Australians have completely warped the game and I know American punters as well as Australian punters are so grateful for the influence that they have had and it is to this day one of the biggest phenomenons in sports as general so as always if you enjoy punning related content consider subscribing have an amazing day in peace

Channel: Isaac Punts

Views: 412,840

Keywords: Football, Punting, Kicking, NFL, CFL, XFL, USFL

Id: QUTAVpp-y8E

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023