From Geelong to the Meadowlands: The Jets Australian Connection

Ask most Jets fans to name the franchise’s international links, and they will probably mention the London games.  Fewer would point to Victoria, Australia, yet two of the punters who wore green and white over the last twenty years learned to kick a ball on Australian rules ovals long before they ever saw a goalpost shaped like a tuning fork. Their stories say a lot about how the modern NFL finds talent, and they explain why a surprisingly loyal pocket of Gang Green supporters now gets up before sunrise on the other side of the world to watch every snap.

Ben Graham: The Geelong Veteran Who Became a Rookie at 31

Ben Graham had already lived one full sporting career before he arrived in New York. He played 219 games for the Geelong Football Club in the AFL between 1993 and 2004, the kind of resume that makes a player a household name in Victoria. Then, at an age when most NFL punters are settled veterans, he started again from scratch.

The Jets signed him, and he punted for the team from 2005 to 2008. It was not a seamless adjustment. An Australian rules kick is designed to travel to a teammate on the run; an NFL punt is designed to hang in the air long enough for the coverage team to arrive while landing where the returner can do the least damage. Graham had to learn hang time, directional kicking and the timing of an NFL snap while doing it in front of the New York media, which is not the gentlest classroom in sport.

After leaving the Jets in 2008, he moved through New Orleans and on to Arizona, and in February 2009 he became the first Australian to play in a Super Bowl when the Cardinals faced Pittsburgh in Super Bowl XLIII. Jets fans who remember his years at the Meadowlands tend to remember him fondly: a big, good-humored professional who treated a second career as a privilege rather than a gimmick.

Lac Edwards and the Draft-Day Surprise

The second chapter came a decade later. With the 235th pick of the 2016 NFL Draft, in the seventh round, the Jets selected Lachlan Edwards out of Sam Houston State. Edwards grew up in Hastings, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, and his path to the league was remarkably quick. He had only taken up punting seriously a few years earlier before heading to college football in Texas.

Edwards handled punting for the Jets from 2016 through 2019, a four-season run that made him one of the more durable specialists of that period of the franchise’s history. After New York he had stints with several other organisations, including Buffalo, the Chargers, Detroit and Carolina, a fairly typical journey for a specialist in a league where only 32 punting jobs exist at any one time.

Two Aussies in Green: The Numbers

Player	Hometown or AFL background	College	Jets years	Notable career moment
Ben Graham	Geelong Football Club, 219 AFL games	None – signed straight from the AFL	2005-2008	First Australian to play in a Super Bowl (XLIII, with Arizona)
Lachlan Edwards	Hastings, Victoria	Sam Houston State	2016-2019	Seventh-round pick, 235th overall, in 2016

The contrast between the two routes is the whole story of how the pipeline has evolved. Graham crossed over as an established professional athlete with nothing to prove except that his leg would translate. Edwards took the newer path through American college football, arriving in the NFL as a draftee rather than a curiosity.

Why Australian Legs Keep Landing NFL Jobs

The trend did not start or stop with the Jets. Melbourne-based academy ProKick Australia has spent years preparing young kickers for US college programmes, and Australian punters have become a familiar sight across the league. Michael Dickson in Seattle and Mitch Wishnowsky in San Francisco are among the best-known modern examples, and the pipeline has expanded beyond specialists too, with former rugby league players such as Jordan Mailata becoming starters on the offensive line.

Several things make Australian kickers attractive to NFL front offices:

• They grow up kicking on the move. Australian rules football demands accurate kicks while running and under pressure, which builds comfort with awkward snaps and a rushing defence.
• They can make the ball do different things. Many Aussie punters use spiraling, end-over-end and drop-punt styles, which let them control bounce and roll near the opponent’s goal line.
• They arrive with professional habits. Players coming through academies or semi-professional football already understand training loads, recovery and public scrutiny.
• They are often older and mentally steadier. A 24-year-old freshman who has already played competitive football at home tends to handle pressure differently from a teenager straight out of high school.

None of that guarantees success. Plenty of Australian prospects never make a roster, and NFL special teams coaches still value consistency above everything. But the hit rate has been good enough that teams now actively scout Australian talent rather than stumbling across it.

The NFL Comes to Melbourne

The connection is now running in both directions. The league confirmed that the Los Angeles Rams would host the San Francisco 49ers at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the 2026 season, the first regular-season NFL game ever played in Australia. The MCG is the spiritual home of Australian rules football, and Ben Graham himself described the occasion as a huge moment for Australian sport.

For Jets fans, the Melbourne game is a reminder of how much the league’s audience has grown beyond North America. It also matters for the Australians who already follow New York: when the NFL is staged in their own country, the sport stops being something they watch at odd hours and becomes something that their friends, colleagues and local media talk about too.

Following Gang Green From the Other Side of the World

Being an Australian Jets fan comes with a schedule all of its own. Because of the time difference, a regular Sunday afternoon kickoff in New Jersey happens before breakfast on Monday in Sydney or Melbourne, so the most dedicated fans set alarms, stream the game on a phone in bed, or watch the replay while carefully avoiding social media until they can.

Those early-morning broadcasts have built their own habits.  Supporters in group chats trade reactions between plays, and some Australian fans who follow the dawn kickoff log in atCrownpokies AU to play a few pokies during the long television timeouts, a familiar way for Aussies to pass the downtime between drives. When the two-minute warning arrives, most fans put everything else away anyway; nothing competes with the end of a close Jets game.

Kickoff Times Converted for Australian Fans

The table below shows how common NFL broadcast windows translate once US daylight saving has ended in early November, while Sydney and Melbourne are on daylight saving time.

NFL broadcast window (US Eastern Time)	Sydney and Melbourne	Brisbane	Perth
Sunday 1:00pm	Monday 5:00am	Monday 4:00am	Monday 2:00am
Sunday 4:25pm	Monday 8:25am	Monday 7:25am	Monday 5:25am
Sunday Night Football, 8:20pm	Monday 12:20pm	Monday 11:20am	Monday 9:20am
Monday Night Football, 8:15pm	Tuesday 12:15pm	Tuesday 11:15am	Tuesday 9:15am
Thursday Night Football, 8:15pm	Friday 12:15pm	Friday 11:15am	Friday 9:15am

Times shift by an hour in early October and early November as daylight saving starts in Australia and ends in the United States, so it is worth double-checking the clock for those weeks.

For anyone in Australia who wants to start following the Jets properly, a simple routine makes the season far easier:

1. Add the Jets schedule to your phone calendar in your local time zone so the clock changes are handled automatically.
2. Pick a reliable official NFL streaming option available in Australia rather than relying on unofficial links that drop out at the worst moments.
3. Mute team and league notifications on game mornings if you plan to watch a replay later.
4. Join an Australian NFL fan group or local watch party, especially for prime-time games that land at lunchtime.
5. Learn the special teams basics, because when an Australian is punting, every hang time and fair catch suddenly feels personal.

Super Bowl III: The Story Every New Fan Hears First

Australian fans who discover the Jets quickly learn the franchise’s defining moment. On January 12, 1969, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, quarterback Joe Namath backed up his famous guarantee and the Jets beat the heavily favoured Baltimore Colts 16-7 in Super Bowl III. It was the first Super Bowl win by an AFL team and remains one of the most important results in the history of professional football, proving the upstart league could compete with the NFL’s establishment.

There is neat symmetry for Australian supporters in that story. The Jets of 1969 were the underdogs from the younger league who refused to accept the pecking order. The Australian kickers who later wore the same colours were outsiders too, arriving from a different code entirely and earning their places one punt at a time.

A Small Pipeline With a Big Following

Two punters across two decades might not sound like much in a franchise history that stretches back to the New York Titans. But Ben Graham and Lachlan Edwards gave a generation of Australians a reason to adopt Gang Green, and many of those fans stayed long after their countrymen moved on.

With the league now playing regular-season football in Melbourne, the next Australian to pull on a Jets jersey may not be a punter at all. Whoever it is, there will be people in Geelong, Hastings and everywhere in between setting a 5 am alarm to watch.

The post From Geelong to the Meadowlands: The Jets Australian Connection appeared first on JetNation.com – New York Jets Blog & Forum. Be sure to check out the JetNation forums for around-the-clock Jets talk. https://forums.JetNation.com You can discuss this with other NY Jets fans on the Jet Nation message board. Or visit of on Facebook.

Source: https://www.jetnation.com/2026/10/23/from-geelong-to-the-meadowlands-the-jets-australian-connection/