My job is not hard. I’m just the punter. – Utah punter Tom Hackett
What’s going on here? The University of Utah football team is holding its weekly press conference and Tom Hackett, one of the Ute players, is surrounded by media. For 40 minutes, reporters pepper him with questions. He stays behind after teammates have left to answer more questions, and that includes the new running back sensation, Devontae Booker.
There must be some mistake. Tom Hackett is a punter, for crying out loud.
Who talks to punters?
He plays only a few plays every game and then goes to the bench and hangs with his mates.
But everyone wants to talk to Hackett these days because he affects football games like few others at his position. His coach calls him “a weapon.” He flips the field, coach Kyle Whittingham likes to say. With one kick, the Utes go from having poor field position to pinning their opponents against their own goal line.
Hackett ranks second in the country in punting average, at 48 yards per game, but that isn’t the best measure of his impact. Hackett has punted 37 times this season; only nine of them have even been returnable — for a total of 23 yards, or 2.6 yards per return. The Utes lead the nation in net punting (45.2 yards), which measures the total yards a punt gains, including the return. Hackett has put 11 punts inside the 10-yard line this season, four inside the 5.
Bottom line: The Utes’ kicking game and defense are the primary reasons the Utes are 5-1 and nationally ranked despite an anemic offense. Hackett repeatedly has bailed out the Utes after the offense has left the team in bad field position.
Hackett shrugs off all the attention over the feats of his feet. “My job is not hard,” he says. “I’m just the punter.”
Hackett is from Australia and one of a growing number of his countrymen who have been coming to the U.S. in recent years just to punt and/or kick a football for American universities. They are converts from Australian rules football, where the ball is advanced by kicking, not passing. In Australian rules, every player on the field is a kicker. They begin kicking the football — the “footy,” they call it — as boys. Instead of playing catch with their dads, they play kick. The Aussies are becoming to kicking what Kenyans are to distance running.
Among the many Australians who are punting for collegiate teams: Cameron Johnston (Ohio State), Jamie Keehn (LSU), Sam Irwin-Hill (Arkansas), Tim Gleeson (Rutgers), Will Gleeson (Ole Miss) and Alexander Kinal (Wake Forest). Tom Hornsey, another Aussie, won the 2013 Ray Guy Award last season as the nation’s top punter. Gleeson and Hackett have both won the weekly Ray Guy Award this season. A few Aussie punters have made it to the NFL.
Hackett isn’t even the only Australian punter in Utah. Weber State’s Blake O’Neill averages 41.8 yards per punt and has pinned opponents inside the 20-yard line 15 times this season, with a long punt of 74 yards.
Like all Australian punters, Hackett and O'Neill followed a familiar path to U.S. football. They grew up playing Australian rules football, learned of American football on TV, and then enrolled in Prokick Australia. According to a 2013 report in USA Today, Aussie youths pay as much as $8,000 for a year or more of training at Prokick, a school for American-style punting that was established by Nathan Chapman, a former professional Australian rules player. There are tryouts just to get into the school. Among other prerequisites, aspiring punters must be able to produce a punt with a 4.5-second hang time. The payoff for the school’s graduates is a ticket to an American university and college football.
“I really got into watching the NFL (on TV)," says O'Neill, "and then I heard about these guys coming over and doing well at punting.”
Says Hackett, “I watched a news program about a player who was going to come over here and try the NFL as a punter and kicker,” he says.
Hackett and O’Neill began kicking the footy as young boys and then gravitated to the American game when they finished high school. In Australian rules, they kick the ball end over end; at Prokick, they learn to punt a spiral, but they still retain the end-over-end and uncanny placement skills in their repertoire.
How skilled is Hackett? When he was asked how many times he could punt a football from the 50-yard line and stop it inside the 5, he replied, “I could do it 10 out of 10 times inside the 5, easily.” Asked the same question, O’Neill says, “I could do it 9 out of 10 times.” They say this without a hint of braggadocio; they state this matter-of-factly, as if it were no more difficult than passing a ball. They’re like golfers who can back-spin a ball and lay it up gently on a green. Hackett often takes the snap from center and rolls out, kicking the down the sideline.
“It’s a natural ability that we build over the years of kicking the ball,” says O’Neill. “We can apply it to the American game.”
Asked to explain his punting technique, Hackett, the cliched laid-back Australia with long brown hair, played it coy. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve just been doing it my whole life. I’d tell you to ask my old man (who taught him), but I’d tell him not to tell you.” He is more open when he explains why he sleeps with a football the night before a game — “To get the feel of it.”
Hackett and O’Neill, who met at Prokick last May, talk on the phone fairly often. They plan to kick the footy together next summer, when they can compare notes about their American adventure.
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com