OGDEN — There’s no way to know what life would hold for Jack Burgess if not for American football, but he’s glad it’s how things have unfolded.

“It’s been really great for me,” the junior punter from Australia said.

Burgess is one of the latest exports of Prokick Australia to land at Weber State (and in Division I college football in general), and he’s having one of the best punting seasons in the country right now.

This season, 14 of his 39 punts have gone for 50-plus yards, 15 have been downed inside the opponents’ 20-yard line, and he averages 47.1 yards per punt — good for No. 2 in FCS and No. 10 in Division I.

“I did a little bit of uni back home and dropped out,” Burgess said. “I wasn’t really feeling it. So I sort of have no idea what I’d be doing right now if it wasn’t for college. … Back home, I didn’t really have a lot of expectations for myself.”

Like many Australian young men, he’d played soccer and some Australian rules football. He had a few friends go through the Prokick program and decided to give it a go.

That program begins with training the basics of learning how to kick an American football and eventually, feelers go out to college football coaches to try and find landing spots for the players.

Burgess figured he’d end up at a Division II school but was in touch with Jay Hill and Weber State. A few moments of searching on the internet showed WSU was “one of the best FCS schools” so Burgess said yes pretty quickly to that opportunity.

Over just a couple of months, Burgess was offered by Weber State, flew to the United States and started fall camp with the Wildcats in 2022.

Now he’s studying nutrition and will see how far football can take him.

He’s found the sports environment here to be a bit different.

“I was not good at any sports back home, really. We had team sports, but it wasn’t taken as seriously … Australian football, you go to training twice a week and then turn up on game day,” Burgess said. “Being able to live and breathe football every day is surreal to me. It’s drilled into you a few hours a day, and I love it. It’s incredible.”

The lives of players on kicking units is a bit different than other position players. To protect against fatigue and injury, kickers don’t spend every practice (usually about 1 1/2 hours per day) swinging their legs over and over. There’s a day or two of focused kicking, and other days of repetitive snapping, holding (Burgess is also WSU’s place-kicking holder), catching and dropping drills that don’t involve actually putting a foot to a ball.

Other than that, you’ll see the special teams gang in red no-contact practice jerseys roaming around various parts of the sidelines or holding the chains when the “real players” — as they call their offensive and defensive teammates — are doing 11-on-11 sessions.

That’s one of a few things that lends to the idea that kickers are, well, quirky. Burgess says Weber State’s crew fits the stereotype.

“We sort of embrace the goofy side and just sort of be the punching bags of the team, if you will,” Burgess said.

Long snapper Grant Sands gets a good feel for how well Burgess is punting because the long snapper is one of the key parts of the punt coverage team.

“He booms it down there. I’m out of breath by the time I get back to the sideline,” Sands said.

Sands says the punt team often makes for entertaining moments during film study.

“We’ll get down there and down it inside the 10, I’ll tap the hat of whoever has the ball and then turn around and see Jack running down the field doing some random celebration that he thought of on the spot,” Sands said. “It’s going to look dumb on film and we’re going to laugh at him. He’s like a baby giraffe sometimes when he’s running.”

Burgess turned in a solid first college campaign last year after somewhat rushing into his life in the United States and trying to incorporate himself at Weber State. He averaged 40.5 yards per punt and hit five for more than 50 yards.

“I was struggling with some things last year but I still ended up with an OK first year,” he said. “I was pretty confident after a whole offseason, getting more comfortable, that I could take things to the next level … I think I’ve had a better year than even I thought I could.”

He’s done just that, though perhaps at a quantity that the team and its fans would like to decrease a little — the nature of football is, generally, that the less you see of the punter, the better. But Burgess and the punt team have generally put their part of the complementary football puzzle in place.

For example, in last week’s game, Weber State averaged a starting position at its own 41-yard line while UC Davis averaged starting at its own 21.

He hits for 50-plus yards twice every game to this point, and has kicked at least one for 57-plus yards in each of the last five weeks, with season-longs of 70 against Montana State and 61 at Utah.

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