It’s been happening for a while. The influence of Australians on college football – and, by extension, the National Football League – has been growing steadily over the last half-decade or so.
But this year, Australian participation in NCAA football has reached it’s high water mark.
This, because of punter Tom Hornsey, who, inside the space of a week, won both the Ray Guy Award (presented to the best punter in the nation, and beating out fellow finalists Texas A and M’s Drew Kaser and Purdue Boilermaker Cody Webster) and was then named to the very prestigious first-team All American unit.
Players winning both a positional excellence award and being named to first-team All American Honours does happen, but it’s extremely rare. You have to be very, very good to double scoop of a positional excellence award and then to be named among the best players in the vast landscape of college football.
Hornsey fits in there quite nicely. Google his name and you’ll find a half-dozen articles musing whether he’s the best punter in all of America.
Certainly, enough college football pundits must think so: the double honour presented to him this week is proof of that.
Punting for Memphis, Hornsey, becomes only the third ever Memphis Tiger to be given first-team All American honours, following in the footsteps of offensive lineman Mike Stark in 1971 and kicker Joe Allison in 1992.
It goes without saying, too, that Hornsey is the first Australian to achieve either – and both – honours.
The Ray Guy Award is not awarded without great consideration.
There is a class of brilliant punters across America, so the numbers for the eventual winner need to be immense.
For Hornsey, they were definitely that. His average punt was 45.2 yards. That’s good enough for first in the American Athletic Conference and eighth in all of America.
Even more impressively, of 62 punts on the season, 29 of them landed within the 20-yard line. That’s punting gold.
You can’t say enough about having a weapon such as Hornsey, a senior from Canberra and the Australian Institute of Sport, to flip field position.
It must nice to be Justin Fuente, head coach of the Memphis Tigers. So, your offense has failed to convert on third down to keep the drive alive and must punt?
What happens? Fuente simply trots out his weapon, Hornsey, with a pretty good feeling that he’s going to flip field position and give the Tiger defence plenty to work with.
Generally, you can’t score points on every possession.
Having a good punter is the first step to getting the football back in better field position for the next possession. Your team is only as good as your punter. His kick, good or bad, will have a huge bearing on what occurs on the opposition’s next possession.
American football is still a growing sport in Australia, but awards and accolades like the ones Hornsey has deservedly collected this week – along with a little more press coverage, and better understanding of the technical side of field position and punting – will only increase the profile of the sport in the southern hemisphere.
It’s fair to say that most of Australia hadn’t heard of Hornsey before this week, but now he must be named among our country’s most successful sportsmen.
How hard it is to get a scholarship, win the starting job and keep it via successful on-field performance – a punter’s net yardage gained can be influenced by wind, rain, snow, sleet, a breakdown of punt block coverage – should never be underestimated.
Hopefully, Hornsey’s terrific dual honours are the first step to a better understanding of college football and more recognition.
More than that, hopefully it opens the way for more Australian kickers and punters to travel to America and forge their own legacy kicking footballs up and down the college gridiron on fall Saturdays.
Congratulations, Tom!
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