How deliberate mis-kicks changed one of sport’s strangest positions

Darren Bennett played for more than 10 years in the NFL. For some, that does not make him a footballer.

The 6ft 5in 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 as a 29-year-old 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 at all.”

Thirty years later and attitudes remain much the same towards one of sport’s strangest positions and the players used in the specific instance when a team kick the ball away to clear their lines.

On average, an NFL match features 153 plays, with a punter being called upon for eight of them.

The players may only spend about three minutes on the field, which is not really much time to get noticed – even if you are a history-maker.

“I go walk down in Baltimore and nobody knows who I am,” says retired punter Sam Koch, who played a franchise-record 256 games for the Baltimore Ravens.

Out of the 250 or so players drafted every year, maybe one or two are punters. They are one of the lowest paying positions in the sport and only one punter has ever been drafted in the first round.

Such is the anonymity accompanying the position that during the 2012 draft the selection of a punter in the third round prompted disbelief and a leading US sports broadcaster to deliver a message to the American people: “Punters are people too.”

That message soon became a meme and became emblazoned on merchandise.

But while people haven’t been caring, punting has been 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 looked to the 20 million TV viewers like he was just playing very, very badly.

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 kick-offs, when the ball is kicked from the ground to score points or to begin the game. Punting, meanwhile, refers to the act where a team give back possession when a player kicks the ball from his hands as far into the opponents’ half as possible.

Traditionally, punters kicked ‘turnover’ balls which spiralled through the air – the benefit being they travel 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 always has been – to punt the ball as high as you can, to allow your team to get down there and force the punt returner to have a fair catch,” says Randy Brown, kicking coach with the Baltimore Ravens.

A fair catch is when the player receiving the ball is entitled to take the catch without interference, but, once it is caught, the ball is dead and they cannot attempt to gain any yards.

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 one way, Koch would shape to kick it left or right but cut across the ball and slice it in the other direction. He would strike ‘knuckleballs’, where rather than the ball spiralling through the air cleanly, it would wobble erratically.

And, crucially, he would employ the ‘drop-punt’, a technique predominately used in Aussie Rules football, and until this point only in very specific instances in American football, where the ball tended to be punted so that it turned end-over-end.

Balls would travel fewer yards but give the receiver less time to react and prepare his return.

And it worked.

Koch punted six times to Brown in that match, forcing four fair catches, with the other two punts being left alone to roll out of bounds.

“We told Sam, ‘put the ball on the ground as quickly as you can’,” says Randy Brown. “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 totally against the grain.”

Koch adds: “They’d look like they were mis-hits and crowds would boo, but we knew what we were executing.”

In a game of inches, Koch’s stats improved by yards. Net yardage is the defining statistic for a punter. In 2013 Koch’s net yardage was 38.9, a figure good enough for 22nd in the league. In 2014 it was 43.2, the best in the league.

“It was very exciting,” reminisces Koch. “We created something that’s totally against the norm for how many years.”

For Brown, it was “a eureka moment”.

“If you’re going to introduce 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 wasn’t some 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, which previously had been used almost exclusively in circumstances that demanded a short-range punt, had been introduced to the NFL by Bennett in the 1990s and been used by one of Koch’s rival punters in the 2013-14 play-offs.

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 an interview with the NFL in 2016.

“A golfer wants to hit a draw. Well, I can get the ball to draw towards the sideline, then once it gets over to the sideline it usually starts slowing down and starting its descent, it straightens out and then allows it to roll down that sideline.”

Beforehand, punters only needed a driver to succeed in the NFL. Koch made it that they needed every club in the bag.

Koch’s exploits did not just have a technical impact on the NFL, but a demographic one.

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.

Tory Taylor, 27 and born in Melbourne, is in his first season of the NFL and tipped to be a generational talent.

The success of Koch’s approach inadvertently led to the United States’ most fertile breeding ground for punters being on the other side of the world.

Aussie Rules players need to hit all types of punts in all types of situations, a skill that is now required in American football.

“In Australia, we kick the ball to each other from three years old,” explains Bennett.

“If you see kids in their backyard [in Australia], they are not throwing the ball to each other. They’re kicking it. We never throw it.”

In short, this is also why the same transfer from rugby to the NFL has not happened. Despite kicking being a regular component of the sport, the primary method of passing is still throwing, so the number of repetitions gained kicking simply is not there compared to Aussie Rules.

“American kids are taught to look at the ball when they punt,” says Bennett. “So they have no awareness of what’s going on, whereas Australians can look at the situation, make an adjustment and hit 75% of the punt they were going to anyway.”

Training schools have been set up for wannabe Aussie punters, including Bennett’s own Gridiron Company, and ProKick Australia, which launched in 2007. ProKick has had 260 of its alumni achieve full scholarships to US colleges.

The flood of Australian punters at college level has not quite been replicated in the NFL. In 2023 one in two of the biggest sporting colleges had Australians as punters, whereas last season in the NFL it was one in six teams.

“We’re at the tip of the iceberg,” smiles Brown. “We’ve always wanted the ball hit one way, and now the Aussies have come over and given us so many different angles and helped grow our game.”

The success of Australians is opening the mind of American football to what else might be out there.

This season Charlie Smyth, born in Northern Ireland, made the switch from Gaelic football to being a place-kicker for the New Orleans Saints.

“We brought four Irish guys over to kick for the specialist showcase,” says Brown. “I mean, wow. There’s talented players all over the world – let’s go find them.

“It might be that I’m that guy who travels the world and finds specialists that 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 if you want success in life, be an expert in a field that no-one else is.

“So am I one of the best that’s ever done it? Yes, because I’m one of the only ones who has. There just aren’t enough of us in the lake. There just isn’t.”

Thanks to Brown, Koch and Australia, however, the punting lake is growing.