WHEN HE DREAMS, Ben Rhyne is the demon of the football field. As the ball carrier comes his way, he rockets into position and delivers one of the sport's fabled big hits. The other guy is lucky just to survive.
As a fantasy, it's intoxicating. But in reality, it would be a nightmare: Rhyne is Stanford's punter, so if he's making that kind of tackle, it's because he's made the wrong kind of kick. His job is to launch the ball with either enough power or finesse to ensure that runbacks are curtailed before the punter has to do the bone rattling.
All Rhyne really cares about is being "the best punter possible." His subconscious may be rebelling, but he knows his role. "We save a lot of brain cells," he says of kicking specialists. "We're not running into people as often."
File that under student-athlete symmetry. Rhyne, one of the team's fifth-year seniors, won the Pac-12 Conference's scholar-athlete award last season when he was finishing his undergraduate degree in biomechanical engineering. Those unscrambled brain cells now will be devoted to the master's program in management science and engineering.
Rhyne was surprised when selected for the award. "It's very meaningful," he says. "I was incredibly humbled. That's our mission; we're here to win in the classroom as well as on the field."
Both challenges are formidable, but the on-the-field issues this season come with an extra salting of tribulation. Each opponent for the first four road games—Washington, Notre Dame, Arizona State and Oregon—made the top 25 list in the preseason coaches' poll. And the regular season schedule closes with Big Game in Berkeley and a showdown with highly touted UCLA in Pasadena.
Nasty, right? Yes and no, says Rhyne. "It always is. People point out our schedule every year. I don't know what they're thinking. It's the Pac-12."
As punter, Rhyne is "the 12th man on defense" every time he forces the other team's offense to start deep in its own territory. And on offense, he has the little-heralded but steel-nerved task of holder for placekicker Jordan Williamson.
This season, though, he has one affiliation that's looming over everything else. It's his bond with the other fifth-year seniors, including Williamson.
"We went through everything together the first time, and we'll go through everything together the last time."
