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 being introduced to a big Green Bay Packers linebacker, who asked him what position he played.
“I said ‘gambler’,” says Bennett, who moved to the United States when he was 29 after a successful career as an Australian rules footballer.
“Ach,” the two-time Super Bowl-winning linebacker responded. “You’re not even a real football player.”
“And he just left,” laughs Bennett, who spent most of his NFL career with the San Diego Chargers in the 1990s. “I didn’t have any credibility with him at all.”
Thirty years later, attitudes remain the same towards one of the strangest positions in sport and the players used in the specific case where a team kicks the ball to clear their lines.
On average, an NFL game features 153 plays, and a bettor is called for eight of them.
Players can only spend about three minutes on the field, which really isn’t much time to get noticed, even if you’re a history maker.
“I walk into Baltimore and no one knows who I am,” says retired punter Sam Koch, who played in a franchise-record 256 games for the Baltimore Ravens.
Of the 250 or so players selected each year, perhaps one or two are gamblers. They are one of the lowest paying positions in sports and only one punter has been selected in the first round.
Such is the anonymity that accompanies the position that during the 2012 draft the selection of a bettor in the third round prompted disbelief and a major American sports broadcaster to send a message to the American people: “Betters are people too.”
That message soon became a meme and appeared emblazoned on merchandise.
But even though people haven’t cared, batting has been changing.
During a Sunday night primetime game 10 years ago, Koch, inspired by Bennett’s Aussie Rules-style punts, transformed it.
But at the time it seemed to the 20 million viewers that he was simply playing very, very badly.
To understand what Koch did, you need to know what the punt 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 start the game. Meanwhile, punting refers to the act in which a team returns possession when a player kicks the ball with his hands as far away from the opponent’s field as possible.
Traditionally, punters kicked balls that spiraled into the air, with the benefit of traveling further. The negative, however, is that the flight path is predictable and easier for the receiving player to catch.
“The punting philosophy is, and always has been, to punt the ball as high as possible, to allow your team to get there and force the punt returner to make a fair catch,” says Randy Brown, punting coach. Baltimore Ravens.
A fair catch is when the player receiving the ball has the right to catch it without interference, but once caught, the ball is dead and he cannot attempt to gain yardage.
Koch’s Ravens were facing the Pittsburgh Steelers and one of their main attractions, Antonio Brown, was the best punt returner in the league.
The Ravens needed to try something bold, so they decided Koch would deliberately mis-kick balls.
Directing his hips in one direction, Koch prepared to kick it left or right, but he cut the ball and cut it in the other direction. He hit ‘knuckleballs’, where instead of the ball spinning cleanly in the air, it wobbled erratically.
And, more importantly, it would employ the ‘drop-punt’, a technique used predominantly in Australian rules football, and until then only in very specific cases in American football, where the ball tended to be kicked so that it flipped. . -end.
The balls would travel fewer yards but would give the receiver less time to react and prepare for his return.
And it worked.
Koch punted Brown six times in that game, forcing four fair catches, and the other two punts were left alone to go out of bounds.
“We told Sam, ‘Put the ball on the ground as fast as you can,'” Randy Brown says. “Instead of hitting a ball that has a five-second hang time, our goal was to hit one with three and a half seconds.
“What we were doing was totally against the grain.”
Adds Koch: “They looked like mistakes and the crowd would boo them, but we knew what we were executing.”
In a game of inches, Koch’s stats improved yards. Net yards are the defining statistic of a bettor. In 2013, Koch’s net yards were 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 created something that totally goes against the norm for how many years?”
For Brown, it was “a eureka moment.”
“If you’re going to perform something like this on a Sunday night in front of 20 million-plus people, you don’t want your player to be embarrassed, and as a coach, you don’t want to be embarrassed.” he says.
“This was not a preseason game. From the coach’s point of view, it was the confidence in the player to execute his ability on the big stage.”
Koch, who retired in 2022 after a 16-year career, drew inspiration from several sources.
The Australian-style punt, which had previously been used almost exclusively in circumstances calling for a short-range punt, was introduced to the NFL by Bennett in the 1990s and was used by one of Koch’s rival punters in the 2013 campaign. -14. off.
But it was Koch who took it to the extreme.
“We have turnovers, drives, hooks, boomerangs, knuckleballs. And they all do different things,” Koch said in an interview with the NFL in 2016.
“A golfer wants to hit a draw. Well, I can get the ball closer to the sideline, then once it gets to the sideline, it usually starts to slow down and starts going down, straightens out and then lets it go.” roll down that margin.”
Before, bettors only needed one driver to succeed in the NFL. Koch made it clear that they needed every stick in the bag.
Koch’s exploits not only had a technical impact on the NFL, but also a demographic one.
Australians now dominate punting in American football.
The Ray Guy Award, given to the best bettor in college football, has been won by an Australian in eight of the last 11 years.
Tory Taylor, 27, born in Melbourne, is in his first season in the NFL and is emerging as a generational talent.
The success of Koch’s approach inadvertently led to the most fertile breeding ground for American gamblers being on the other side of the world.
Aussie Rules players need to make all types of clearances in all types of situations, a skill now required in American football.
“In Australia we kick ourselves from the age of three,” explains Bennett.
“If you see kids in their backyard (in Australia), they don’t throw the ball to each other. They kick it. We never throw it.”
In short, this is also the reason why the same transfer from rugby to the NFL has not occurred. Even though kicking is a regular component of the sport, the primary passing method is still throwing, so the number of reps gained from kicking is simply not equal compared to Australian Rules.
“American kids are taught to look at the ball when they punt,” 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% of the clearance they were going to do anyway.”
Training schools have been set up for aspiring Australian punters, including Bennett’s own Gridiron Company and ProKick Australia, which launched in 2007. ProKick has seen 260 of its students gain full scholarships to US universities.
The rush of Australian bettors at the university level has not been fully replicated in the NFL. In 2023, one in two of the major sporting universities had Australians as bettors, while last season in the NFL it was one in six teams.
“We’re at the tip of the iceberg,” Brown smiles. “We always wanted the ball to hit in one direction, and now the Australians have stepped up and given us a lot of different angles and helped us grow our game.”
The Aussies’ success is opening American football’s mind to what could be out there.
This season, Northern Ireland-born Charlie Smyth transitioned from Gaelic football to kicker for the New Orleans Saints.
“We brought in four Irish people to dance in the specialty exhibit,” Brown says. “I mean, wow. There are talented players all over the world; let’s go find them.”
“It could be that I’m 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 watch guys kick in Italy, Australia and Spain.
“I read an article 40 years ago that said if you want to be successful in life, be an expert in a field that no one else is.
“So I’m one of the best to have done it? Yes, because I’m one of the only ones to have done it. There just aren’t enough of us on the lake. There just aren’t enough of us.”
However, thanks to Brown, Koch and Australia, the boating lake is growing.
