Rookie punter Michael Dickson lighting up NFL season already

Fortune has a way of changing fast for Michael Dickson, the Australian punter who has lit up the NFL.

Seattle Seahawks kicker Michael Dickson stunned the NFL with drop kick start against the Chicago Bears.

Fortune has a way of changing fast for Michael Dickson, the Australian punter who has lit up the NFL just two games into his rookie season.

Booming punts, deftly placed kicks and a rarely seen drop-kick have commentators and fans raving about the 22-year-old.

“Out of this world,” Seattle’s Super Bowl winning coach Pete Carroll says of his new recruit. “What a kicker … what he has shown us so far is stuff that we’ve never seen.”

Not bad for a player whose time on the field is measured in seconds in a 60-minute game. Blink, and you’ll miss this guy.

It could have been so different for the Sydney Swans academy player from Kirrawee, in Sydney’s south.

The key defender went undrafted at the end of 2014 and hit a crossroads in his young career.

“I decided I was going to have a year off,” Dickson said. “I didn’t have the love for (AFL) so I decided to try punting out. Everything happened really quickly.

“I was playing in the (second-tier) NEAFL, and made a grand final with the Swans, but I just wasn’t liking it.”

It led Dickson to a training camp run by former Brisbane Lion and Hawthorn player Nathan Chapman, whose own crack at a punter’s job, with the Green Bay Packers, ended in the pre-season in 2004. “I had a trial with Chappy’ and punted pretty well with the NFL football,” Dickson said.

“I always had a big boot. Growing up I used to watch videos of the biggest goals kicked, by guys like (Tony) Lockett, Sav Rocca and Ben Graham.

“I always thought it was awesome that Sav did that. That he could come out and use his AFL skills in the NFL. It made me think ‘I can do this’.

“I’d take the kick-ins in AFL, and it got some of my teammates’ attention. That was when the idea of punting (in the NFL) came up.”

In March 2015, Chapman told his protege that he could be playing in the US that year. He was right.

By July of that year, Dickson had a scholarship with the University of Texas, where more than 100,000 people cram in to watch the college team play home games.

Dickson got a quick education on why Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry once said: “Football is to Texas what religion is to a priest.”

“That was crazy,” Dickson said. “I didn’t realise how big college football was.

“It’s the most fanatical support you’ll find. That caught me off guard.

“The amount of pressure around Texas football is kind of ridiculous but it prepared me for the pressure of playing in the NFL.”

Going from a Sherrin to the smaller, harder NFL pill wasn’t easy.

“It’s harder to hit the sweet spot with an American football,” Dickson said. “It’s small, hard and pointy. And kicking off two steps (is an adjustment) but I’ve got used to it.

“I try to get it close to the boundary (sideline). You can’t ­always make it spin backwards.”

In three years with the Longhorns, he went from fumbling novice to the best college kicker in the country, scooping up awards along the way. In his final game he became just the second punter in history to win MVP honours in an end-of-season bowl “final”.

Said stunned Texas coach Tom Herman after Dickson’s college finale: “I’ve never seen a punter affect the game the way he did.”

In addition to being able to boot 50-plus yard punts downfield, Dickson had become adept at landing his kicks just short of the opposition goal line, “flipping the field” on the other team.

In April this year, Seattle raised eyebrows for trading up to pick Dickson early in the NFL draft, ahead of some of the country’s best young position players.

“He was just too unique of a player,” Seattle general manager John Schneider told ESPN after the draft. “He can do stuff with the ball that’s pretty amazing.”

No one is questioning the Seahawks now.

US sports website SB nation has labelled the 188cm, 94kg player as “one of the best punting prospects of all time”.

“If someone was engineering the perfect NFL punter in an underground laboratory, they would come up with something along the lines of Dickson,” it said.

Dickson is the latest in a long line of athletes groomed with AFL skills to catch on in the NFL.

Six Australians are now on an NFL roster, four of them punters.

Eleven of the 14 to have played in the league since Colin Ridgway got a start with the Dallas Cowboys in 1965 have played the same position.

The other three are Colin Scotts (defensive end); Jarryd Hayne (running back/special teams); and Adam Gotsis (defensive end).