Oh that’s a good point. That’s a real good point. I was thinking about from the college ranks, but the best kickers and punters may very well come from abroad. I believe those sports value directional kicking.
The Giants’ Scottish punter has been running hot and cold lately and starting to frustrate me. This past game he actually dropped the ball that had been hiked to him, then just punted it while it was lying on the ground. Went like 20 yards, penalty, loss of down, so the Eagles got the ball 10 yards closer to the end zone than the Giants’ line of scrimmage when they hiked the punt. And they were only on like their own 30, of course, because the offense couldn’t move the ball to save their life, so the Eagles essentially got the ball in the red zone.
I guess that’s the downside of going with guys who grew up playing a different sport. I like to imagine he played it like George Costanza: Was that wrong? Should I not do that?
The NFL’s had a number of punters who came from Australian football over the past few decades, including Darren Bennett (who was the punter on the league’s 1990s All-Decade team), Mat McBriar, Sav Rocca, Jordan Berry, and the aforementioned Michael Dickson.
Foreign-born placekickers were really common in the NFL in the 1970s and 1980s, as soccer-style placekicking became the norm, and a number of foreign players (who had extensive experience playing soccer) came to the NFL (the Gogolak brothers, Jan Stenerud, Garo Yepremian, Morten Andersen, Gary Anderson, etc.) Most NFL kickers now are US-born, but there are a handful of foreign-born ones in the league today: Cairo Santos (Brazil), Younghoe Koo (South Korea), and Greg Joseph (South Africa).
Garo Yepremian, a Cyprus-born Armenian soccer player who was in the early wave of soccer-style placekickers in the NFL, started out with the Lions in 1966-67. One of his teammates was Alex Karras, who didn’t like Yepremian, and didn’t think that the kicker particularly understood football (something that was apparently not uncommon with the early soccer-style kickers). After Yepremian allegedly celebrated kicking a late-game extra point (in a game that the Lions were losing badly), Karras loved to repeat the story that Yepremian claimed he was celebrating because “I keek a touchdown!”
49ers punter Mitch Wishnowsky, too. Most didn’t come directly from the AFL to the NFL, though. Wishnowski, Dickson, McBriar and Berry all punted at American colleges without professional Australian Rules experience.
