Matt Gill’s freshman season at Kansas has already turned into a family affair, and Saturday’s Union Jack Classic will give him one more chance to share the experience with the people who matter most.
The Australian punter is set to have his parents, sister and cousin in the stands in England, after he pieced together extra tickets from teammates. For Gill, that makes the matchup with Arizona State feel bigger than just another game.
“I think I’m a perfect representation of what the global stage of American football is about,” the freshman said on Wednesday. “I’m Australian playing American football in England at the moment. So it doesn’t get more international than that.”
Gill’s road to this point has been a little different from the usual Australian punter pipeline. Kansas has had three straight Australians at the position, but Gill is younger than most, came through the new Australian Kicking Academy instead of the more established Prokick route, and had already shown some interest in American football before arriving thanks to a sister who introduced him to the sport and signed him up for a kicking trial.
His family has been along for parts of the ride already. His father was in attendance for what was supposed to be Gill’s debut on Sept. 4 against Long Island, only to watch Kansas’ offense make his services unnecessary. Gill called that outcome “bittersweet.”
The following week against Missouri, the family got the real first look. With two aunts and an uncle also on hand, Gill finally got to punt in a Kansas uniform.
“It was nice to punt, but wish we could have got the win there,” Gill said.
That outing offered the first real snapshot of what he can bring. He helped pin Missouri deep early, and though a 32-yard punt on fourth-and-33 in the fourth quarter pulled down the numbers a bit, he still finished with four punts for 158 yards. Lance Leipold praised the performance afterward, saying, “For his first college experience, I thought he had a good game.”
Gill wasn’t worried about the box score.
“At the end of the day, my job is not to worry about the stats that I finish with, it’s about helping the team,” Gill said. “I thought I had a good second punt, pinned them at the 2, and I thought my execution was pretty good. Yeah, I thought I did my job well.”
Saturday’s game could bring another special-teams-heavy chapter. The last Kansas-Arizona State meeting included a fake punt and a blocked field goal, the kind of chaos that can turn a hidden-yardage game on its head.
And if Gill has his way, the jokes may even travel beyond football. The freshman is a Chelsea supporter, as are “quite a few” Jayhawks, and he pointed to a social-media post he saw a couple weeks ago about Wembley.
“I’m a big Chelsea fan,” he said. “A couple weeks ago I saw something that said if we beat Arizona State in Wembley we’ll have a better record over the past, like, three years than Chelsea have had there.”
No matter what happens against the Sun Devils, Gill knows his support system will be right there with him.
“It’s not easy traveling across the world to do something that is very foreign to you,” he said. “So I think to have that base with my family is just really, really special.”
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