NFL coaches often say they work in a copycat league. When Joe Montana led the San Francisco 49ers into the NFL’s elite in the early 1980s, other teams began searching for quarterbacks who could throw the short, accurate passes Montana threw so well. When the Giants won two titles behind Lawrence Taylor and the Big Blue Wrecking Crew, every team suddenly needed an athletic linebacker to rush the quarterback. And when the Tampa Bay Bucs won Super Bowl XXXVII with their Cover 2 defense, it quickly became the rage across the league.

The latest innovation that appears to be reaching a tipping point is the use of punters from Australia. Following Ben Graham’s strong 2005 season with the Jets as a 32-year-old rookie, there are emerging signs that more Aussies could become NFL punters in the near future. Just last month, two Australian football players indicated that they plan to switch to the American game.

Chad Parrish of South Australia attended a tryout in Tampa and impressed the assembled NFL scouts enough to earn an invitation to play for the Berlin Thunder of NFL Europe. Kangaroos Football Club forward Sav Rocca said he plans to retire from the Australian game soon to give the NFL a shot.

It wasn’t too long ago that basketball players like Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac changed the perception of European NBA players, making what once was an anomaly commonplace. Graham and his countrymen are doing likewise.

Australia breeds great punters because punting is integral to its version of football, which is more like rugby than American football. Because punting is the primary way to advance the ball in Australian football – not to mention the only way to score – players must learn to punt accurately in order to get the ball to their teammates and keep it from their opponents.

Rocca has said that he developed the skills necessary to punt in America, but he isn’t sure how well he’ll adjust to the American ball, which is harder and lighter than the Australian ball.

“It is pretty hard actually,” Rocca told the Australian Web site Sportal.com.au. “I’ve gone to the park a couple of times and just had a bit of a kick, but it is a little bit harder than what we’ve got here.”

Once an Aussie has developed punting skills, there is a significant financial incentive to take those skills to America. Punters aren’t particularly well paid by NFL standards, but they certainly make more in the United States than they would in Australia. The highest salaries in Australian football are about the equivalent of the league minimum in the NFL, about $250,000.

Even if they can sympathize with financial incentives, most people affiliated with Australian football are none too pleased with what they perceive as the NFL poaching their players. “It’s out of my hands,” Geelong Football Club coach Mark Thompson said when Graham left his team last year. “We really want Ben to stay. We can’t compete with that sort of money, though.”

Thompson’s loss, of course, was the Jets’ gain. Graham averaged 43.7 yards a punt last year, good for ninth in the NFL. His unorthodox technique also put an unusual spin on his kicks, and some op posing returners had a hard time fielding them. That was one reason the Jets cut veteran Micah Knorr in favor of Graham during the exhibition season – opposing returners muffed three of Graham’s first 11 preseason punts. In the regular season the spin on the punts wasn’t as great a factor (four of Graham’s 74 punts were fumbled), but even the possibility of a punter creating turnovers is intriguing to NFL coaches.

Last year Graham became the fourth Aussie to punt in the NFL. The first was the little-remembered Colin Ridgway, who played for the Dallas Cowboys in 1965. Ridgway was a novelty who lasted just three games before being released. It would be three decades before another Australian punter got a shot. He was Darren Bennett, formerly of the Melbourne Football Club, who became an All-Pro and was named to the NFL’s All-Decade Team for the 1990s. Bennett has played 11 years in the NFL, most recently with the Minnesota Vikings last season. Mat McBriar punted for the Brighton Grammar School in Australia before earning a scholarship to the University of Hawaii. He’s entering his third season with the Cowboys.

The biggest obstacle for Aussie punters is learning to elevate their kicks. The Australian game doesn’t require the punter to be able to kick the ball high; in some situations putting too much height on the ball is a bad thing because it gives the opposing team more time to get to the ball. So any player looking to make the transition from Australia to America needs to work on his hang time.

The NFL played a regular-season game in Mexico City last year and has discussed making games outside the United States an annual tradition, with a 2006 game tentatively set for London. If the league can schedule the 2007 meeting between the Jets and Cowboys for Australia, it would guarantee a raucous crowd to cheer on Graham and McBriar, and perhaps the first crowd in the sport’s history that had more enthusiasm for punts than for touchdowns.

The NFL is the most popular sports league in the United States, but it’s a long way from having the global reach of the NBA, NHL, or Major League Baseball. Just as foreign players in those sports have given the leagues international popularity, Australian punters could be the key to enhancing the league’s status Down Under.

Mr. Smith is a regular writer for FootballOutsiders.com.