The chant, a staple from American sports fans, started to rise from the stand during a college football game one Saturday afternoon in Iowa.
“M-V-P! M-V-P!”
That chant often honors superstars playing the more glamorous positions on the gridiron. But the recipient of such affection on this day was neither a quarterback nor a wide receiver.
He was a punter. A punter from Australia.
Tory Taylor played perhaps the pivotal role in Iowa’s 7-3 victory against South Dakota State on 3 September. The Melbourne native punted a career-best 10 times for 479 yards, another career high. Seven of his kicks landed inside the opponent’s 20-yard line. Five of those seven fell inside the Jackrabbits’ 10.
“That is a powerful weapon,” said John Stiegelmeier, South Dakota State’s head coach. “I thought he kicked it out-of-bounds one time and rolls it down to the 2-yard-line. At one point I said, ‘This kid is a freak.’”
That “freak” represents the increasing presence and dominance of Australian punters in American college football.
Two of them will face each other in the College Football Playoff championship game on Monday night at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. Georgia’s Brett Thorson, another Melbourne native, will oppose Texas Christian’s Jordy Sandy from nearby Traralgon. A third, Ohio State’s Jesse Mirco from Fremantle, played in the semi-finals.
A quick survey of NCAA statistics and personal accolades reveal the significant impact Australian punters are making.
Four of the top 10 punters in attempts and total yardage for the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision – the highest level of college football – come from Australia. Two placed among the top 10 in average yards per punt, with Mirco 10th at 45.59.
Taylor – who ranked second in yardage (3,339) and fourth in punts (74) – made the Associated Press’ All-America second team. Another Melbourne native, Cincinnati’s Mason Fletcher, was a third-team All-American after finishing sixth in punting average (46.29). Fletcher, whose father played Australian rules football in the Australian Football League for 23 seasons, also was the American Athletic Conference’s special teams player of the year.
Meanwhile, Rutgers’ Adam Korsak earned the most prestigious honor in college punting. After sharing second place in attempts (75) and finishing fourth in yardage (3,207), Korsak received the Ray Guy Award. Guy, who played 14 seasons in the NFL, is the only punting specialist in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The 25-year-old Korsak, yet another Melbourne native, explained why Australians are succeeding.
“We grew up punting an Australian football back and forth with our buddies or our dad in the front yard, like how Americans might grow up throwing a baseball or an American football with their buddies or their dad,” he said. “It’s an instinct, a skill that we learn, and it’s very transferable to punting in American football.”
Yet Australians learning to punt must adapt to different rules, demands and a lighter, slightly longer ball with pointed ends.
“It’s altogether different when it comes to the quick punts, roll punts and the short-range punts,” said Mirco, who finished his second season with the Buckeyes. “I still learn every day while I’m here.”
Nathan Chapman, co-founder of Prokick Australia, which trains Australian rules players to become punters and place-kickers for American colleges, described the biggest change as “learning how to kick high”, he said.
“There are some massive, massive adjustments that need to be made,” said Chapman, who played in the AFL for eight years before trying unsuccessfully to become an NFL punter. “We spend 80% of our time teaching spiral kicks. If we hit a spiral here in Australia, it’s generally because you want it to go far, not higher and a bit shorter. It’s not until they start learning it with a different-shaped ball that they realize how tricky it is.
“There’s a perception that the Australians come across and just do Aussie kicks and do them on the run. It’s none of that.
“We have to get over there by being able to spiral, and the guys are good at it. We actually get them recruited 95% of the time by being able to spiral and do the Aussie kicks.”
Mirco, Sandy, Thorson, Taylor, Fletcher and Korsak all trained at Prokick Australia. Six of the FBS’s top 10 in punting yardage – including a punter from New Zealand and another from Ireland – attended that academy, which has developed a pipeline to numerous American universities. Since Prokick Australia’s founding in 2007, seven graduates have received the Guy Award and 87 earned All-America honors. Four currently play in the NFL.
The dream of playing American football can ignite with a serendipitous spark. In 2019, during a vacation in the United States, Mirco watched one of his countrymen, Max Duffy, punt for Kentucky.
“Kicking was something I’ve done since I was four years old in Australia. It was something I love doing and something I’ve been good at my whole life,” said Mirco, also 25. “I wanted to get back into sport, and this was an opportunity to do so.”
Sandy, 29, was working in a paper mill in Traralgon when he and a co-worker decided to change careers.
“It’s a pretty big employer in my hometown,” he said. “So we would work 12-hour shifts together, Sunday shifts and night shifts. I think we both decided that there was probably more for us out there.”
After their shifts ended at 6am, both men would carpool to Prokick Australia in Melbourne, “which would be a four-hour round trip three times a week”, Sandy said. His co-worker, Tom Hutton, received a scholarship to Oklahoma State, where he became the oldest college player this season at 32.
But adjusting to American college football goes beyond learning new kicking techniques and rules.
“You don’t have any family and you don’t really have any friends when you first get here,” Mirco said. “Your teammates and staff can definitely help with that but you’ve got to start figuring things out yourself and grow up. It’s not just football.”
Australia’s rigid Covid-19 restrictions, which prevented international travel, made matters worse. Because of those constraints in 2020, the family of Old Dominion quarterback Hayden Wolfe welcomed into its home Australian punter Ethan Duane, who went for nearly two years without seeing his own family.
Restrictions also forced Sandy to remain on campus when his father in Australia contracted pancreatitis.
“His organs went into failure, and I was kind of stuck during Covid,” Sandy said. “That was really hard, you know, being away from family.”
Yet the demands of college life, especially for an athlete, make little room for personal melancholy.
“It was a big adjustment, and I wasn’t necessarily homesick,” Korsak said. “But I felt like I was able to stay busy enough and take it day-to-day enough to where I didn’t experience that homesickness.”
As time passes, college becomes a second home.
“I grew up in a small country town in Australia, about two hours east of Melbourne, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect,” Sandy said. “But I’ve seen quite a bit of America, and I think Texas is probably the closest to Australia in terms of culture and people. I fell in love with the place and I want to stay here long term.”
Sandy even started a local charity. For every punt he places inside an opponent’s 20-yard line, Sandy donates $20 to the Hope Center for Autism in Fort Worth, Texas. Other donors have matched or exceeded that amount.
“I have an autistic cousin back home,” he said. “I’ve seen some of the challenges that her family has had to face.”
In Iowa, Taylor sells T-shirts with the phrases “Punting is Winning” and “Oi! It’s Taylor Time!” to raise money for Count The Kicks, which fights stillbirths. Offensive Coordinator Brian Ferentz and his wife, Nikki, lost their unborn daughter in 2017.
Not only do Taylor, Mirco, Thorson and Fletcher have eligibility remaining. More Australians are coming. Right now, Prokick Australia is training about 60 of their countrymen to follow them, Chapman said.
“Hopefully, we can keep it going,” Sandy said. “It’s really cool to be able to have some Australian guys to play against or to follow here in the States. It’s been really special.”
