It was early, around 6am on a Sunday morning, and Jackson Ross was already awake.
The former Hawks forward, who spent three years on Hawthorn’s list before being cut in late 2020, was only just starting to familiarise himself with the world of college football.
It was a world close friend Tory Taylor already knew well, one he was not only a part of but quickly embraced by. Having a thick Australian accent helps. Not as much as playing well though.
And on this day, Taylor wasn’t just playing well. He was, as Ross put it speaking to foxsports.com.au ahead of this week’s NFL draft, putting on an “absolute clinic”.
Although Ross didn’t really know it at the time. Didn’t appreciate how Taylor, who landed six of his nine punts inside the 20-yard line on that day, helped Iowa win field position — and the game — against Penn State.
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“I didn’t really understand what was going on too much,” Ross, now a punter for Tennessee, said.
“… Looking back, I now realise what he was doing, how awesome he was playing and how he actually changed the momentum in that game where they actually won.
“It was cool to watch and cool for mum to watch as well. I think that was her first sort of realisation of what could happen for me as well.”
At one point in the fourth quarter Taylor pinned Penn State on its one-yard line, later following it up with two more punts that backed the Nittany Lions up to the eight-yard line.
Penn State head coach James Franklin said Taylor “could have been the MVP” of the game.
Nebraska punter William Przystup, meanwhile, told AP that it seemed like Taylor was “already at NFL level” while everyone else at the position was “trying to strive to get there”.
Former NFL punter turned TV personality and one of Taylor’s most vocal supporters, Pat McAfee, simply described the Australian as a “f***ing weapon”.
“It’s going to be a long road for you Sean Clifford,” McAfee mockingly added as the quarterback threw a pick after Taylor pinned Penn State’s offence at the two-yard line early in the first quarter.
“Tory Taylor is controlling the field position. Field position wins you games. Tory Taylor wins you games.”
That was particularly true given the sorry state of Iowa’s offence, which often relied on Taylor’s mix of power and precision to flip the field. Its dominant defence then did the rest.
Now Taylor, fresh off setting the NCAA 85-year-old single-season yardage record (4,479), has had his NFL dream realised after the Chicago Bears selected him with the No. 122 overall pick in the fourth round of the draft.
It means Taylor is the second-highest drafted punter since 2012.
But to the people of Iowa, Taylor is so much more than just the latest winner of the Ray Guy Award, which is given to the best punter in college football.
Because if you ask Hawkeyes special teams coordinator LeVar Woods what he thinks about when he hears the name Tory Taylor, it has nothing to do with his booming leg.
“First off I think of a person who cared about others,” Woods told foxsports.com.au.
“Who wanted to know about you as a person, who wanted to know about your life, what was going on with you, with your family. He just cared.”
Cared enough to use his platform to support a local non-profit, helping raise $50,000 while even being credited with saving a life.
To Hawkeyes fans, proudly wearing ‘Punting is Winning’ shirts and waving Australian flags, Taylor is one of their own. And to Taylor Iowa became his second home, a long way from his actual one.
Around 52 hours, in fact, which is how long coach Woods travelled in January 2020 to meet Taylor in person.
Suddenly, all kinds of new possibilities were opening up for Taylor, just as quickly as parts of the world itself started to do the opposite.
A RECRUITING TRIP ‘UNLIKE ANY OTHER’ AND PROMISING PROSPECT WITH LOTS TO LEARN
When Taylor first turned up at Prokick Australia he wasn’t exactly sure what he was getting himself into, but Nathan Chapman liked what he saw.
Chapman, who had his own dreams of making it to the NFL before founding the Prokick program alongside John Smith in 2007, thought Taylor was “pretty talented”.
“But,” as Chapman explained, “it sort of wasn’t the right time in his life to get started”.
So, Taylor went away and then, after giving it a bit more thought, came back around a year later.
“It just felt like he was in a better spot,” Chapman told foxsports.com.au.
“He digested it just a bit more about what was potentially in front of him and when he came back he was all in.”
So was Woods, having been given permission by Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz to make the 52-hour round trip to Melbourne to recruit Taylor after hearing about him through Chapman and Smith.
“It was certainly an interesting experience unlike any other recruiting trip I’ve ever been on,” Woods said at the time.
“I’ve been kind of all over different corners of this country looking at players at different positions and whatnot, but certainly have not crossed the borders or crossed the ocean into Australia.”
Woods had already been sent some tape of Taylor but he wanted to see him punt in person, meet him in person.
Did he anticipate that this unknown Australian would go on to emerge as one of the best punters in college football and, in the process, become a cult hero of sorts among Iowa fans?
Probably not. But even early on, Woods could see potential in the “very, very impressive” leg talent that Taylor flashed during that recruiting trip.
As for Taylor the person, he was “a little shy early on” according to the former NFL linebacker.
“I think he was kind of new to everything and didn’t totally understand maybe necessarily what was going on and why I was there,” Woods, now speaking to foxsports.com.au before the draft,added.
“… But that quickly got erased once we met face to face and had a chance to chat for a bit.”
At the end of what had been a successful recruiting trip, Woods was getting ready to head back to Iowa and picked up the paper to read over breakfast the morning of his flight home.
“It talked about a strain of virus that Australians were concerned with,” Woods said, although he didn’t think much of it at the time.
“Fast forward six weeks all of a sudden the entire world is shutting down.”
Taylor and his family were scheduled to visit the University of Iowa in April but that was later cancelled and when it came time for him to get on a plane to travel to America, he had to first quarantine for two weeks in Sydney without any guarantee he would get his visa.
When Taylor arrived in Iowa, another fortnight in isolation was waiting for him.
“That’s really hard on someone,” Woods said.
“But he came in as a player and immediately you could see his talent, you could see his ability and within 10 days he was playing his first game.”
So sudden was Taylor’s arrival at Iowa that there was not even a photo to go with the Australian’s player profile in the team media guide when he played his first game.
Woods can still remember Taylor’s debut game against Purdue and his first punt, which went 55 yards and was fair caught.
“He was so nervous,” explained Woods, “he didn’t know what to do”.
Everything was new, from the sport and its rules to even the United States itself.
That’s right, Taylor wasn’t even sure what the rest of the country looked like, asking Woods a question ahead of the Purdue game that really drove home just how much this Melbourne native had to learn — and how far he has since come.
The team had arrived in West Lafayette ahead of the game at Ross-Ade Stadium and were having a position meeting while sharing a meal, as was typically the case on Friday nights.
With it being Taylor’s first game, Woods asked him how he was finding it all and specifically what he thought about being there in West Lafayette for what was not only his debut but his first road trip of the season.
“Coach, is this what it’s like everywhere in America?” was his response, to which a slightly perplexed Woods said in return: “What do you mean?”.
“Well,” the Australian replied, “I’ve only ever been to Iowa City or to West Lafayette”.
“So that was very eye-opening for me,” Woods said at the time.
“I hadn’t even thought about that. Everything is brand new to him.”
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But even if that was the case, Taylor proved he was a quick learner, averaging a Big Ten-best 46.1 yards in the first two games of his collegiate career against Purdue and Northwestern, punting 10 times with half of those downed inside the 20-yard line.
Meanwhile, only once did someone try to return one of Taylor’s 10 punts. It turned out to be a mistake as Northwestern fumbled the ball for an eight-yard loss that led to Iowa’s first score of the game.
“We just sent him out there and he punted the ball and it ended up being a great punt,” Woods, speaking now ahead of the draft to foxsports.com.au, said of Taylor’s debut.
“He went out in his first game and punted incredibly well. No one even really knew who he was because he had only been on the team for 10 days.”
With time that changed and in just a few years, MVP chants were ringing out of Kinnick Stadium.
HOW TAYLOR BECAME THE ‘PINNACLE’ OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL
To understand just how highly regarded Taylor was in college football, first you need to know two other names.
Ray Guy, who the award for the nation’s best punter in college football is named after, and Reggie Roby, whose booming leg made him an Iowa legend and one of the greatest to ever play at the position.
Taylor, who broke an 85-year-old NCAA record with 4479 punting yards from 93 attempts last season, etched his name into the history books as Iowa’s first-ever Ray Guy Award winner.
The Australian also became the only Big Ten punter to be named the Eddleman-Fields Punter of the Year twice in their career, further cementing his place in Hawkeyes folklore.
With all that success came lofty expectations and, when the moment felt right, lofty comparisons.
That moment came after Taylor had one of the best games of his career in a 15-6 win at Wisconsin last year.
“The impact he [Taylor] has on our team and the games is reminiscent of Reggie Roby, who was a huge part of our success in 1981,” Iowa head coach Ferentz said after that game.
“If you got a guy who is really stellar like that, it’s a real luxury.”
Ferentz was a first-year assistant coach at Iowa back in 1981, when Roby’s powerful leg helped the Hawkeyes become Big Ten Champions and later secure a Rose Bowl berth.
“I really kind of learned the importance of a great punter,” Ferentz said of that year.
So, when asked to compare Taylor with an all-time Iowa great, Ferentz didn’t take the question lightly, understanding just how much weight his words would carry.
And with that answer, the legend of Tory Taylor continued to grow.
“To be in that company of those guys, that’s pretty impressive,” Woods said.
Despite battling winds that averaged 27 kilometres per hour, Taylor punted a career-high 10 times for 506 yards while landing six inside the 20-yard line in the win over Wisconsin.
Taylor alone more than doubled the total yards of offence (237) Iowa managed in the game, with the Big Ten Network even posting a nearly two-minute long video of the Australian’s punts on social media.
A few days later, NBC Sports analyst and former Ohio State linebacker Joshua Perry posted a video on his Twitter account declaring Taylor should be in the Heisman conversation for the most valuable player in college football.
“We all know J.J. McCarthy, the frontrunner to win the Heisman out of any of the guys in the Big Ten, but I think we need to put Tory Taylor, the Iowa punter, in that conversation,” Perry said.
“He affects winning for his team more than any player in America.”
While LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels ended up being crowned with the honour, one Big Ten head coach did vote for Taylor as the Silver Football award winner, which is given to the conference’s MVP — and it wasn’t Ferentz.
“He’s been one of their best players for the whole time he’s been there, which is like really crazy to say about a punter, but it’s true,” Ross, Taylor’s close friend and now Tennessee punter, said.
“… He’s pretty sound in all parts of his game whether that’s trying to pin it deep or just kicking long balls with great hang time and stuff like that, he really does it all. He’s been the pinnacle of college football the last couple of years.”
Going back to that impressive debut game against Purdue, Taylor continued to deliver in a stellar freshman season that was capped off by being named Big Ten Punter of the Year.
“I was hoping he was good, but, like, wow,” head coach Ferentz said after a win against Iowa State in Taylor’s sophomore campaign, where he averaged 51.1 yards on eight punts, placing five inside the 20-yard line.
“The best part, he has no idea what he’s doing half the time in terms of football. He does as a player. The rest of the stuff, it’s an adventure ride for him. He’s enjoying life.”
Taylor kept enjoying life as a junior too, named Big Ten Conference Special Teams Player of the Week after landing seven of his 10 punts inside the 20-yard line, with two leading to safeties, in a 7-3 season-opening win over South Dakota State.
By the end of his final season at Iowa, Taylor was a Ray Guy Award winner, unanimous consensus All-American, fan favourite and one of the best punters in program history.
TORY TAYLOR’S 2023 SEASON IN NUMBERS
1 — Ray Guy Award won
32 — Punts landed inside the 20, leading the Big Ten
48.2 — Taylor’s average yards per punt, an NCAA record
52.3 — Taylor’s career-best single-game yard average (against Penn State)
4,479 — Taylor’s total punting yards, another NCAA record
“Special teams isn’t always the most glamorous job… kicking, punting, covering down those punts,” Woods said.
“However, Tory Taylor was so good at what he did that when he would walk into the stadium, the first time he’d go out and punt, the stadium would start chanting his name and say MVP. “Australian flags would be in the stands waving around. People absolutely loved him and adored him. He’d walk into the stadium, our stadium is just under 70,000 people, and the place would go crazy for him, which again doesn’t happen for the punter.”
Because typically when a drive ends in a punt, it is seen as a sign of offensive failure.
“But here,” added Woods, “Tory was so good at what he did and so popular that people couldn’t wait for him to get on the field.
“They knew he was going to make a difference and do really well with his punts.”
And Taylor needed to given the state of Iowa’s offence, with the Australian punting for 4,479 yards last season in 14 games — 1,183 more than what the entire Hawkeyes offence put up (3,296).
No other team in the nation had more punting yards than offensive yards and yet, Iowa finished the season 7-2 in the Big Ten with an overall record of 10-2 in the regular season.
Not all because of Taylor but he certainly brought new meaning to the ‘Punting Is Winning’ T-shirts Iowa fans proudly wore on a regular basis.
McAfee remains one of Taylor’s biggest fans.
“As we’re talking about anomaly, one-of-one and we’re talking about an alien, that might be what Tory Taylor is,” the former NFL punter said in 2022.
“Going into the season every Hawkeye fan knew for the last few years the style of football they’ve been playing has been one step above rugby. That offence has been miserable to watch… and then this Aussie came in named Tory Taylor and he became electrifying on fourth downs.
“Coming into the season they knew he was a weapon.”
Although, as much as Taylor’s growing popularity in Iowa was largely a product of what he produced on the field, only adding to it was the impact he was having off it too.
That impact came in the unlikeliest of places too — and that is what made it so “powerful”.
‘HE’S UNFORGETTABLE’: HOW ‘REVERED’ TAYLOR IS HELPING SAVE LIVES
At least, that is according to Emily Price of Count the Kicks, a non-profit organisation founded in 2008 by five women in central Iowa, brought together by a shared pain.
They had all lost their daughters to stillbirth or infant death in the early 2000s and, in a bid to help prevent other families from experiencing the same heartbreak, set up the evidence-based stillbirth prevention program.
Central to their goal was teaching expectant parents the importance of tracking foetal movement daily during the third trimester of pregnancy, or in other words — counting the kicks.
Although that message isn’t always a guarantee of getting through, even if it is from a medical professional.
Taylor on the other hand, “revered” in Iowa as Price put it, was able to convince one expectant mother, Stephanie, to download the Count the Kicks app. It ended up saving her second daughter Lexi’s life.
“Very recently we got a phone call or an email from a mum who lives in our state and whose doctor had told her about Count the Kicks and the app,” Price told foxsports.com.au.
“They told her to pay attention to her movements and download her app. She thought at the time, ‘Oh I don’t need that, I’m fine, I don’t need to download it’.
“But then she saw Tory talking about it on social media and in the news and she loves Tory. So she thought, ‘If Tory Taylor is talking about this, I should really be downloading this app’. And so she did.”
It just so happened that around two weeks later, Stephanie noticed a change.
“Her baby was in huge distress,” Price added.
She went to her doctor and discovered there was an issue and her baby needed to be delivered right away.
“She [Lexi] is now here and healthy and this mum credits Tory for saving her baby’s life,” Price said.
“She was not going to do it, even though her doctor had told her to, but Tory told her to.
“I think when people see Tory as a big, strong athlete football player, it’s a little surprising to hear him talk about babies and maternal health. That’s not something that you always see out of a big, strong athlete, right?
“… The fact that he’s unafraid to talk about it makes it even more powerful because it’s so maybe uncharacteristic of athletes to talk about maternal health of all things. I think that’s part of what makes it so powerful.
“When he talks in Iowa, people listen. He is revered here.”
Such is Taylor’s reputation in Iowa. In fact, the Australian has now raised over $50,000 for the organisation, having pledged back to donate his NIL funds from a partnership with T-shirt company Raygun to Count the Kicks, who he partnered with in 2021.
NIL being name, image and likeness, which Taylor is not able to profit off as an international student. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t use his success on the field for the Hawkeyes to make a difference off it.
Not that anyone asked him to in the first place anyway.
“Tory found his way to be tied to this charity without anyone coercing him to, without anyone telling him he should, it’s just who he is,” Woods said.
“He took interest in it and wanted to learn about it and help them raise money for that charity. That’s not something college kids typically do. That’s something that Tory Taylor did that tells you a lot about him as a person.”
And the connection between Taylor and Count the Kicks won’t stop any time soon, with the Australian already committing to wear the organisation’s logo as part of the NFL’s My Cause My Cleats campaign, should he be drafted to the league.
“I think it is something that will stick with him for the rest of his life because his power and his influence has been so great and I hope that he realises the true measure of his influence,” Price said.
“He’s unforgettable. I don’t know if there’s any other way to describe it other than he’s unforgettable.”
‘FULL-CIRCLE MOMENT’: THE AUSTRALIAN PUNTERS FOLLOWING IN TAYLOR’S FOOTSTEPS
So unforgettable that replacing him was always going to be a challenge for the Hawkeyes, although coach Woods actually took the same plane trip to Australia last year to recruit another Prokick graduate.
“I think he’s got a very bright future as well,” the Hawkeyes special teams coordinator said of Rhys Dakin, Iowa’s new freshman punter.
“The difference between the two is Tory came here a little bit older and arrived here at 22 years old. Rhys got here at 19.
“But as far as ability and potential and looking at the future, I think Rhys is right on track, right on target.”
Dakin also got an early introduction to what life is like as the team’s new punter too when he was recognised by a local while sitting in an airport on the way to Iowa.
All the fan needed was to hear the Australian accent and see the Hawkeyes jumper before he, as Dakin said, “put two and two together”.
“I’ve never experienced that,” the Australian added.
It was a similar feeling, but on a much bigger scale, for Tennessee punter Ross when he first started going out for warm-ups at Neyland Stadium, which has a capacity of 101,915.
“You get out there and you just go… especially in the warm-ups kicking balls you can kind of reflect and think, ‘How is this even happening?’,” Ross said, adding that the biggest crowd he played in was around 22,000 in a VFL grand final.
“I wouldn’t have even known about college football three years ago and three years later, I’m out amongst it and I’m glad a lot of the Australian boys get to experience opportunities like this.”
Ross has Taylor and ProKick Australia to thank for that, having found himself at a bit of a “crossroads” after he was delisted by Hawthorn in 2020 following three years with the club.
Ross didn’t play an AFL game in that period, instead toiling away in the VFL before Taylor recommended he go down one day to try out at ProKick.
“Tory sort of said there was no harm going down and having a kick,” Ross said.
“I did that a week or two later, got in contact with them and everything went pretty quick from there really… that sort of kicked off my career and I’m pretty grateful that he did suggest it.”
Over three years later Ross played Taylor in the Citrus Bowl in what he described as a “full-circle moment” for the pair, who met as students at Haileybury College after bonding over their mutual interest in the A-League.
Taylor was a fan of the then-called Melbourne Heart while Ross was a Victory fan. It was a similar story in the AFL, where Taylor supported Richmond and Ross barracked for Collingwood.
Ross’ AFL dream didn’t work out but now he is making new memories over in the States.
He is also getting messages from former Australian rules players interested in making the switch to college football, including ex-Hawk Damon Greaves, who reached out to Ross after he was delisted and is now a punter for the Kansas Jayhawks.
It is just one example of how Prokick has developed into a punter factory for the college game, pumping out Australian prospects with Taylor set to be the latest to make it to the NFL.
And, potentially, he could even make history in the process.
“My agent has told me that I’m probably, more than likely going to be one of the more higher-drafted punters of the last couple of decades,” Taylor said last month at the NFL Combine.
WHERE IS TAYLOR EXPECTED TO LAND IN THE DRAFT?
Taylor is expected to be the first punter taken off the board in this week’s draft, with Jordan Reid, Matt Miller, Field Yates and Mel Kiper Jr. all rating him the top option in ESPN’s latest draft position rankings.
In fact, FOX Sports national college football writer and analyst RJ Young wrote that if any team is going to take a specialist in the draft, Taylor “is the first one to go off the board”.
The Athletic’s Dane Brugler, widely regarded as one of the best draft analysts in the business, has a fourth-round grade on Taylor and mocked him to the New Orleans Saints in Round 5 with the 150th pick.
A team like New Orleans would make sense given it would provide training camp competition for Australian Lou Hedley, who did well to limit return yards while punting for the Saints last year.
In fact, the Saints only gave up 163 punt return yards which ranked second-best in the league, although their 43.0 yards per punt also rated the worst in the NFL.
Regardless of where he may land, Taylor’s experience playing in the extreme cold, high winds and other testing conditions makes him an asset to any NFL team.
With that in mind, Chicago has a genuine need at the position and is selecting in Round 4 at 122nd overall, meaning the Bears may be one of the earliest options for Taylor in the draft.
Ross said his close friend is “going to be awesome” irrespective of which team takes him.
“I’d love to be in Tennessee,” Ross laughed, although that is unlikely as the Titans already have two punters on their roster in the impressive Ryan Stonehouse and back-up Ty Zentner.
Taylor spent the offseason perfecting his craft in San Diego, reuniting with Chapman ahead of the Combine as he swapped the Iowa cold he had grown used to for the California sunshine.
For Chapman, who has helped Prokick send 270 Australians to U.S. universities on full football scholarships, Taylor’s precision punting in particular sets him apart from the competition.
“He was unbelievable at pinning the other team really deep and putting them at the one, two [or] three-yard line,” Chapman said.
“He had a number of punts where he had to have a short punt but put it close to the goal line. I think his ability to consistently do that also became a real strength of his.
“… You put him with a high-powered offence in the NFL and he’s going to continue and put that ball in the two-yard line. It’s pretty handy.”
Taylor is the eighth Prokick graduate to win the Ray Guy Award and looks set to become its latest graduate to make it to the NFL.
But for Chapman, seeing players go through the program and play in the NFL is “the cream on top”. In other words, it is an added bonus but ultimately not the be-all and end-all.
“They do a lot of hard work and then they get out the other side and then whatever happens, happens,” Chapman said.
“If that’s one year, one game, training camp, it’s just great for them to get there … what we do love is that they get educated, they get their degree in college and then the rest is cream on the top.”
MORE THAN JUST A ‘PHENOMENAL’ PUNTER: THE OTHER SIDE OF TAYLOR
Should Taylor be drafted into the NFL as expected, there will be a lot of memories that will come flooding back in that one, singular moment when he hears his name be called.
From the support of his mother Tanya and father Stuart when he first made the decision to move to the other side of the world to the people that helped get him there in the first place, including Chapman.
Coach Woods too, who had been there with him every step of the way from the first moment they met in Melbourne back in 2020 to a five-day period in Orlando after the 2022 Citrus Bowl, when the realities of the new world forced the rest of the team to leave Taylor behind.
That is, except for one person.
“I remember the doctor rang me later that night at like 9:30,” Taylor said at this year’s NFL Combine, sharing a story “not many people really know about”.
“And the fact that he was ringing — I was like, ‘Oh, God.’”
Taylor had needed to take a Covid-19 test before flying back to Australia after the 20-17 loss to Kentucky in the Citrus Bowl, so he knew there wasn’t good news on the other line.
“They needed someone else as well [to stay with me],” Taylor said, with the positive test result meaning he had to remain in Orlando for another five days.
“Coach Woods ended up staying down there as well. I think that’s one thing that really resonated with me is he’s always wanted the best for his players, and he’s always wanted to make sure that they’re all good.
“That’s really just coach Woods as a person… I’m really grateful to have worked with him.”
The feeling is mutual, because as much as Taylor has gained a lot from their relationship, Woods also knows he is going to miss having Taylor around. Miss the simple things, like just being able to give the amicable Australian a hug.
“Every time I see Tory now,” Woods said, “I give him a hug and I say, ‘I don’t know when I’m going to be able to hug you again, so I want to get this in now’.
“Because I absolutely love the guy. Not just as a player. You know, he was a great player, phenomenal player, very talented. But I just miss being around him every day.
“He was in a position where he was constantly chasing excellence. He was constantly trying to be the greatest at his craft and he achieved that while he was here.”
But even when he achieved that, when Taylor was recognised as the best punter in college football, it wasn’t about chasing and then finding that excellence as an individual.
It was about the team, like it always was for Taylor, as former Hawkeyes tight end and John Mackey Award winner Dallas Clark revealed on a live broadcast of the ‘Pat McAfee Show’ in Iowa.
“The best thing about this kid which a lot of people don’t know is that he got recognised in front of the team [after winning the Ray Guy Award], and one of the coaches slipped me the video of it,” Clark said.
“And his first thing he said to his teammates is, ‘Guys, I just didn’t want to disappoint you’. That is a guy where it’s not about me, he just wanted to do great for his teammates and that is a guy you want in your locker room.
“So, whoever drafts him, great pick, you’re going to love him, he’s incredible.”
Coach Woods agrees, confident there is a “bright future” for Taylor in the NFL.
“He had a phenomenal career,” Woods said.
“I think the way he would walk into a stadium, particularly a home stadium, and people would chant his name and cheer his name, and he’d go out and have an incredible performance, I don’t know if we’ll ever see anyone like that again.”