It's not very often that you see a punter selected with one of the first 125 picks of the NFL Draft, but that's exactly what happened on Saturday when the Chicago Bears decided to take Iowa's Tory Taylor in the fourth round.
Taylor wasn't just the first punter off the board, he was also the first specialist taken. Taylor was selected with the 122nd overall pick, which makes him just the second punter over the past 10 years to be taken in the top 125. The only punter selected higher was Mitch Wishnowsky, who was taken by the San Francisco 49ers with the 110th overall pick in 2019.
Like Wishnowsky, Taylor is an Australian punter who took college football by storm during his career at Iowa. With the Hawkeyes offense struggling for most of his tenure at the school, Taylor became a huge weapon for the team, especially during a 2023 season that ended with him winning the Ray Guy Award.
Not only was Taylor easily the best punter in college football last season -- he was a unanimous All-American -- but he was also one of the best punters in NCAA history. During the 2023 season, Taylor totaled 4,479 punting yards, which broke an NCAA single-season record that had stood for 85 years. He ended up averaging 48.2 yards per punt last season, which also broke a single-season record. Over the course of his four-year career, he averaged 46.3 yards per punt, which was, yup, another NCAA record.
Taylor might have been the only college punter who had his own highlight video in 2023.
Someone is gonna get a weapon in Tory Taylor, I hope whatever fan base gets him treats him like royalty!
— CCHawkeye (@Seth_William11) April 27, 2024
Vid cred: Hawk Tok On TikTok pic.twitter.com/XAd4ud9lDc
The only knock on Taylor is his age. He's already 26 and he'll be 27 before the start of the 2024 season, but since it's easy for a successful punter to put together a long career, the Bears likely weren't fazed by that one issue.
The Bears were in need of a punter because they had some serious issues with the position in 2023. Last season, Trenton Gill had a net average of just 38 yards per punt, which ranked dead last in the NFL out of any player that had at least five punts.
Although Taylor was utilized a lot at Iowa, Caleb Williams isn't planning for Taylor to see much action in Chicago. He had a message for his new teammate on Saturday.
"Hey, you're not going to punt too much this year," Williams wrote Taylor in a text after the punter was drafted, via The Athletic.
The need at punter was so big for the Bears that they decided to use their final pick of the day on Taylor. That's right, the Bears' 2024 draft is already over. The Bears only had four picks in the draft this year and assuming they don't make any trades on Saturday, Taylor will go down as their final pick of 2024 to complete a draft class that includes Williams, Rome Odunze and offensive tackle Kiran Amegadjie.
