It's nearly three in the morning on Sunday in Emu Plains New South Wales but one family in the town isn't sleeping. The town of fewer than 9,000 people doesn't know why their neighbors have orange and blue flags in the yard or that the family will be huddled around a television in the early hours of the morning on Sunday but the Crawshaw's have set alarms to be awake, a pot of coffee is on because they don't want to miss the Florida Gators or their son, Jeremy.
"I tell them, ‘You don’t have to get up — just watch the highlights," Jeremy Crawshaw said on Monday night. "But they always want to watch.”
Watching the highlights normally wouldn't give the Crawshaw's an opportunity to see their son. Punters aren't typically featured in a football highlight package but last Saturday against Vanderbilt was different. Facing a fourth-and-four the Gators decided to call Crawshaw's number.
"They were kind of showing a massive overload to one side and didn't really have anybody on that side of the field," head coach Dan Mullen said after the game. "So just kind of saw that and Greg Knox saw it and took advantage of it and executed it."
The Gators had been practicing the fake punt all week and Crawshaw had been readying for this run his whole life. American football isn't that popular in Australia. Crawshaw grew up dreaming of playing winger for the Penrith Panthers, the professional rugby team near his hometown. Crawshaw played rugby from the age of four until he was 12 and was always one of the quicker kids for his age — his father says he still holds some youth records in the 100 meters back home. His speed, however, took some of his teammates by surprise.
"I really didn’t know it was that fast. I really thought it was going to score honestly," quarterback Emory Jones said. "He took the smart way out, the safe way out, and just to get us the ball back. It was definitely exciting for me to watch because I saw it all week. I didn’t know he was actually that fast.”
Crawshaw's journey to America began at just 16 years old. While in school he got to a point where he began thinking of his future, first thinking he would get an apprenticeship and learn a trade. Australians watch the Super Bowl but college football is far less known than the NFL. When he came across a video of punting. He went and purchased an American football with his own money and started to learn how to punt.
"The spiral is completely different. It’s the pocket spiral, 1-2-3, hit it nice and flat, about knee level. It’s very different to what we do back home," he said. "Back home we’re more of the Aussie style, real low, just punch it to someone about 20 yards away from you, like a quarterback throws. That’s what we do, so the spiral is very different.”
Weeks of practice led him to Pro Kick Australia, an Academy in Melbourne that has quickly built a reputation of sending new Australian lads to college and the NFL to kick American footballs. It worked out for Jeremy but his friends didn't know what he was doing. The concept of American college was foreign to Crawshaw and his mates. Other than a few American movies like Bad Neighbors they didn't have much of a grasp of the American college system. So when Jeremy told his friends he wanted to move to America to attend university and kick footballs they were skeptical.
"When I said I wanted to do that, they said, ‘Ah, you’re probably going to go to one of these D-III schools in the middle of Kansas," Crawshaw remembered.
His first opportunity came in a 1 am phone call from Dan Mullen.
"They said, They needed a fella with a big leg, and I guess I fit that," Crawshaw remembered of his first call with Mullen. "So yeah, it was it was pretty much I was told like, 'Hey, Florida wants to offer you're going to be on a phone call in about three days.' So, and late one night I got on the phone with the coaches and then I was handed off to Mullen, and, yeah, that was it I was offered there so pretty much how that went."
That led to an official visit for the Tennessee week and much to Crawshaw's shock, fraternities and sororities weren't some Hollywood magic, they were a real thing.
“It was so much different to Australia. It’s just those classic, like out of the movies you got to campus, fraternities, sororities, a big stadium and a football team with diehard fans and it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen," he said.
Crawshaw committed to Florida that weekend and spent his first year redshirting behind senior Jacob Finn. The year was mostly spent just adjusting to living somewhere completely new. For starters, there was a lot lost in translation.
"So, I do speak English but it's not, it's not the slang that Americans use. So, when I first got here I was saying a lot of Australian-like kind of slang that everyone knows back home but everyone here was kind of looking at me sideways and thinking I was, I was backwards," he said. "But I've definitely had to like, tone it back in a way so that you Americans can understand me and don't look at me sideways."
Then, just adjusting to the sheer amount of people and how diehard fans are about college football in the south. Crawshaw grew up dreaming of playing ruby or Australian Rules Football — which he educated reporters on the difference of Monday afternoon — and playing in the Grand Final — the Super Bowl of the Australian Rules Football League. Now he gets to play in front of a crowd that large every Saturday and last week, during a 28-yard scamper he introduced himself to those 90,000 Florida fans that had come to see the Gators play.
Fourteen hours ahead, in a small town in New South Wales one home erupted. Despite their son imploring them to sleep on Sunday and not worry about watching the games live they were more than happy to be awake to watch Jeremy's fake punt live. They've probably checked out the highlights a time or two as well.
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