Aussie kicker has come a long way with Terps
This year’s Lou Groza Award for the top kicker in college football went to a shaggy-haired Australian who hadn’t seen an American football game until he played in one.
Brad Craddock grew up playing Australian rules football. It’s a little like rugby, but each team has 18 players on the field and kicking is the key way to score points.
Craddock entered Maryland as a punter, then quickly became the placekicker when the starter got hurt just before the 2012 season started. Two years later, as a junior, Craddock has made all but one of his 19 field-goal tries — missing only a 54-yarder on his last attempt of the regular season.
He tied the all-time Big Ten record for consecutive kicks made and boomed a school-record 57-yarder against Ohio State. On a raw, gusty day in State College, Pa., he kicked a lastminute, 43-yarder to beat Penn State 20-19.
One of college football’s unlikeliest stars, he’ll be kicking off and placekicking for the Terps in Tuesday night’s Foster Farms Bowl against Stanford at Levi’s Stadium.
After graduating from high school in Adelaide, Craddock worked as a tennis coach. What he really wanted to do, though, was to get a football scholarship to an American university.
Several other Australian players had played U.S. college ball and/or in the NFL, most notably Darren Bennett, a two-time All-Pro punter for the San Diego Chargers.
“I looked at what they were doing and thought I could do it,” Craddock said. He relished “the experience of going to another country and learning a completely different culture. Back home, you don’t get a chance to play in front of the crowds you get here. Everything’s on such a big level here.”
He spent three months e-mailing or calling every FBS school. That meant staying up to 3 a.m. because of the time differences. With each rejection, he blacked out a school on his Excel spreadsheet. Finally, he made a connection with Maryland head coach Randy Edsall, who had an Australian punter, Adam Coles, when he coached at UConn.
Maryland gave Craddock his first scholarship offer, and he immediately accepted. Then he had to find out where Maryland was on the map. “I didn’t know it was a state,” he said.
He taught himself the rules of American football by playing the Madden NFL video game against his brother. “We weren’t very good, but I got to learn a lot of stuff,” he said.
Two weeks before the opening game in 2012, Maryland placekicker Nick Ferrara was injured, so Craddock was moved from punter to kicker. That year, he nailed a 52-yarder against Wake Forest and had three other field goals of more than 40 yards. Still, his technique was shaky, and he missed six field-goal attempts and two extrapoint tries.
The worst misfire was a 33-yarder off the left upright that would have beaten North Carolina State in the last minute. “The sound rings in your ear,” he said.
He was so down, he considered giving up, but he returned for his sophomore season with a renewed dedication.
The critical miss helped him “put in perspective what I wanted in my football, what I wanted in life, I guess,” he said. “‘Do I want to do this and be serious about it?’ If so, I have to put in the work to do that. Although you never wish you’d miss a kick, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.”
He was put in contact with ex-Baltimore kicker Matt Stover, who started tutoring him on technique. “I didn’t have a clue who the guy was,” Craddock said. “I went out to kick with him in a park, then went home and called my mom and told her this guy’s a genius.”
No wonder, Leonie Craddock said, after doing a little research. “He was in the NFL for 20 years,” she said.
Stover has been “a blessing,” Craddock said Saturday. He had talked to Stover by phone just that morning.
Armed with Stover’s tips not only on technique but also on handling the job psychologically, Craddock worked feverishly to perfect his stroke. He made 21 of 25 field-goal kicks as a sophomore and was a semifinalist for the Groza Award.
After a loss this season, Edsall encouraged all of his players to sit down with Craddock during a bye week to learn about his work habits.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” Edsall said, “and I mean this sincerely, I don’t know that I’ve ever been around a young man who works so hard at his craft.”