Two years ago, Nevada’s football program had made the fairly unusual move of signing a scholarship punter as part of its 2020 recruiting class.
Moreover, the Pack didn’t use this ticketed ride on an in-state product but rather to sign a punter from the North Atlanta suburb of Marietta – merely some 2,350 miles from Nevada’s campus.
By the end of 2020, Charlie Pollock had entered the NCAA’s Transfer Portal and departed that program.
He resurfaced over the weekend, and, well, Lane Kiffin tells of Pollock’s new origin story as perhaps only Lane Kiffin can do.
“Yeah, I don’t know a whole lot about him; I think he was down at the frat house at a keg party or something where they got him from,” the Ole Miss coach Kiffin said of Pollock, after the Rebels’ weekend work. “We’ve got some conditioning work to do with my guy.
“We just said, ‘Hey, someone go find a punter around campus’ and so we found one who actually used to punt in Division 1. You never know.”
Pollock is listed on the Ole Miss Web site as 6 feet, 1 inches and 250 pounds.
And it is, of course, worth noting that at Kiffin’s behest Ole Miss skipped punting opportunities for fourth-down attempts at a school-record pace last season and amongst all the leaders in that category in college football.
Opponents managed just 17 punt returns against the Rebels.
Still, Pollock’s prep bona fides are considerable: He was rated by noted kicking service Kohls as a five-star prospect, and the 247Sports composite had Pollock as a top-15 punter in the nation.