Beat profile: Drew Butler

It was only a year ago that the University of Georgia football team was without a punter. Its two-year starter had graduated, and it was anyone’s guess who the replacement would be.

Fast-forward a year later and the Bulldogs may have the best punter in all of college football, thanks to the efforts of Drew Butler.

Butler, a junior, captivated Georgia fans with an outstanding, if not magical season, winning the Ray Guy Award as the nation’s top punter after averaging a nation-high 48.1 yards per punt. His average was over two yards further than anyone else in the country, and only 2.2 yards short of the single-season record average, set by LSU’s Chad Kessler in 1997.

His screaming punts that arced over Sanford Stadium all season long not only made him a fan favorite among Bulldog fans, but also earned him All-SEC First-Team selections from Associated Press, SEC Coaches, ESPN, Phil Steele and Sporting News, as well as First-Team All-America by Walter Camp, American Football Coaches, Football Writers Association of America and Sporting News.

All this after being unsure if he would even be the starter.

“At the beginning of last season, there was no certainty that I was going to be the starting punter,” Butler said. “So I started working hard that spring in the weight room, and when camp came around the coaches had confidence in me.”

But Butler wasn’t completely unknown by Bulldog nation. In fact, he’s the second generation of a Georgia football legacy. His father, Kevin Butler, was a kicker for the Bulldogs from 1981-1984 and the first kicker to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2001. He went on to have a 12-year career in the NFL with the Chicago Bears and the Arizona Cardinals, retiring in 1997 as the Bears’ all-time leading scorer.

So it was no surprise that Drew Butler followed the same path as his father in football, and it didn’t take long for recruiting scouts to notice. As a kicker and punter for Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee, Ga., he was a First-Team All-State selection among Class AAAAA schools by the Georgia Sports Writers Association and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2006. At the time of his commitment to Georgia, he was ranked No. 9 in the country among punters by Scout.com.

Having lived up to the expectations Georgia had for him when they offered him a scholarship, Butler is no longer just trying to establish himself at the college level, but now trying to work on the technicalities of his game, such as decreasing his hang time and pinpointing his accuracy.

“I need to continue to build on what I did last year,” Butler said. “It’s time to get more specific and work harder this spring.”

If Butler continues to improve at the pace he did last year, the sky is the limit for him, as he has two years left with the Bulldogs. And like all of his teammates, his goal is to go where his father did after college—the NFL. His 2009 statistics would still give him second-highest punting average in the NFL, second to only the Oakland Raiders’ Shane Lechler.

“Playing in the NFL has always been a dream of mine,” Butler said. “If it’s in the cards I’d love to. It’s just hard to get there.”

Should going pro not be an option after college, Butler still wants to work in sports. He is a Telecommunication Arts major in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, and wants to work in radio or sports broadcast.

However, it’s almost impossible to say that the odds of going professional are against Butler. If he continues to be among the best at his position for the next two years, he’ll be punting his way into the NFL immediately after college.

“To punt in the NFL, it’s all about being able to perform and help out your team,” Butler said. “I hope to do that.”