Worst punt of all time? Oregon State punter gifts Fresno State a touchdown on illegal kick
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Oregon State delivered one of the worst punts in recent memory on Saturday.
If this wasn’t the worst of all time, it was certainly near the top of the list, as Oregon State punter AJ Winsor made the wrong kind of headline during the Beavers’ game against Fresno State.
With Oregon State leading 15-14 in the final minutes of the first half, Winsor was set to punt the ball away to the Bulldogs, and so there was nothing really unusual going on. But leave it to college football to provide something you literally have never seen before, because that’s what happened on this punt.
Winsor mishandled the snap, which was only the first thing to go wrong for him on the play. Then, instead of going to pick up the ball and punt it away, or at least try to, Winsor instead attempted to kick the ball along the turf, as if he were temporarily playing soccer and not football. As you might expect, that didn’t go so well.
The ball rolled to the Beavers’ 42-yarrd line, and though there was a flag on the play for an obvious illegal kick, Fresno State didn’t stop. Specifically, Jaden Carrillo didn’t stop. He picked up the bouncing ball in full stride and returned it for a touchdown with 45 seconds left in the half. Naturally, Fresno State declined the penalty, took the ridiculous touchdown and went into halftime up 20-15.
Here is the play you might never see anything like, ever again:
There was still 1 half left to play in Corvallis, so who knows what the rest of the game had in store. The home crowd had already seen the impossible, now they were just hoping for a comeback victory to give them something good to remember after the punt that wasn’t really a punt.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
