MANHATTAN — Being a punter normally isn’t a glamour position on a college football team.
There isn’t the notoriety that goes to standout Big 12 Conference running backs like Oklahoma State’s Kendall Hunter and Kansas State’s Daniel Thomas, let alone OSU wide receiver Justin Blackmon, the NCAA leader in virtually every pass-catching category.
Yet Cowboys sophomore Quinn Sharp is the marquee punter in the NCAA, whose legend seems to grow every time he swings his powerful right leg.
As Oklahoma State, playing without Blackmon, who was serving a one-game suspension, held off Kansas State 24-14 Saturday afternoon at Bill Snyder Family Stadium, no player was more instrumental than Sharp.
Sharp, the nation’s leading punter with a 48.2 average, had six punts against the Wildcats for a modest 41.3 clip. But four of those boots pinned Kansas State inside its 9-yard line during the game, giving the Wildcats bad field position most of the game.
“Pinning them that deep, the percentages go way down from if they were to get the ball near the 30- or 20-yard line for them to score,” Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy said. “He may have been the MVP of the game, and he has been real good for us all year.
“He was definitely a big part of the game for us today.”
As a freshman last season, Sharp had the difficult task of replacing 2008 Ray Guy Award Winner Matt Fodge. He responded by averaging 45.1 yards on 67 punts in 2009, the second-best single-season mark in OSU history and the best since 1971.
“I think the main thing is just my hang time added onto the distance of my punts,” said Sharp, a native of Mansfield, Texas, who averaged 60 yards in two punts the week before during a 51-41 loss to Nebraska. “It’s always nice to hit a big ball, but I would definitely say pinning them down inside their own 20 is definitely nice.
“I mean it helps out our defense tremendously. You’re talking, you’ve got to make a team drive 80 yards every possession. We worked all week on punt. We knew they had good returners all around. My job today was just get the ball in the air and give my guys a chance to get down there and down it inside the 10. I got some lucky bounces and the ball just happened to go our way today.”
It seemed to suck the ebb-and-flow right out of the Wildcats.
“There were certain segments of the kicking game that hurt us, but Quinn Sharp is excellent,” Kansas State head coach Bill Snyder said. “It is not that he can kick the ball a long ways if he wants to.
“It is how he makes the ball die inside the 5-yard line.”