Luke Bauer wasn’t supposed to be Missouri’s punter this season. Well, let’s back up. Luke Bauer wasn’t supposed to be a punter.
“He fought it forever,” David Brader, Bauer's personal kicking coach, said. “He was like ‘I don’t want to do it.’”
Bauer is doing it. He’s averaging 42.8 yards and has dropped four of his 11 punts inside the opponents’ 20 since taking over the starting job from Riley Williams. Brader thinks he can punt in the NFL. But his ability to kick isn’t really the genesis of this story. We’ll get to that.
Jeff Bauer works 40 to 50 hours a week. He has traveled to every Missouri football game this year and will for the rest of the season. He has to work around regular chemotherapy treatments and doctor visits. He was diagnosed with kidney cancer and had one of his kidneys removed two years ago. The cancer has since spread to other parts of his body.
“I try to get up every day and enjoy what the day brings you. Some days you’re sick and you don’t want to get out of bed,” he said. “I’m gonna try to enjoy every moment with my family.”
Jeff has good days and bad days. Saturday was a good day.
Luke and Jeff’s story is a football story. It’s a story rooted at the University of Missouri, a couple hours west of where Luke grew up and Jeff still lives in Glendale, a St. Louis suburb. But more than that, it’s a family story, a story of a father and his two sons sharing a Saturday night none of them will ever forget.
Luke spent most of fall camp engaged in a battle for the starting punting job for Mizzou. Jack Stonehouse, last year’s starter, had transferred to Syracuse. The job seemed to be there for Bauer, a redshirt sophomore thanks to the extra COVID year of eligibility, to take.
“He really thought he’d have a chance to prosper,” Jeff said. “He’s always been behind the other guys who were older than him and he thought this was his opportunity to shine. You don’t make that kind of commitment without wanting to play.”
Then Missouri went out and landed Williams, a native of Australia, in the transfer portal from Towson. Williams was named the starter for the season opener against South Dakota.
“I respect him, especially because he came from a different country, which I could never do,” Bauer said. “If he was out there I’d put all my faith in him and know that he could get the job done. Now that I’m out there, I know that he’s gonna support me and believe in me to get the job done.”
Bauer was still getting on the field. He was the holder for Harrison Mevis, Missouri’s placekicker. He took the snap and put the ball down for Mevis to boot an SEC record 62-yard field goal to give Missouri a 30-27 win over Kansas State on the final play in week three.
“I was so proud of him being the holder on Mevis’ kick,” Jeff said. “To me that was incredible. I’m pretty emotional. Both my wife and I were crying.”
Jeff graduated from Mizzou in 1987. His memories go back to a 10-0 win over Oklahoma in 1983. He was at the Fifth Down game in 1990 and the kicked and catch in 1997 and just about every other Mizzou home game and a few road games along the way. Punters don’t see a lot of the spotlight. Reserve punters see none of it. But Luke had been part of the operation for one of the biggest plays in recent Mizzou history. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if that had been Jeff’s best memory of his son’s time as a Tiger.
It was. For a week.
Luke took over the starting punting duties the week after that win over Kansas State. Williams had punted 12 times for an average of 40.25 yards per punt. Missouri’s coaching staff was looking for a little more and turned to Bauer.
It just so happened the Tigers’ next game was in St. Louis against Memphis. The Bauers—Jeff and his wife Kathy and their daughter—were there. Because they’re always there and this one was in their home town. Missouri’s third drive started at the 21-yard line and lost four yards in three plays. Luke came on to the field to make his debut, standing a couple yards outside of his own end zone. His first punt covered 59 yards.
“Those are the types of things you’re excited about, hang time, flipping the field,” Jeff said.
Brader, who has worked with Bauer for about six years now, talked to Luke after the game. “He said, ’It made my dad proud.’”
A new favorite memory. This one lasted three weeks.
Jeff and Kathy usually attend Mizzou games together. For the Tigers’ trip to Kentucky last weekend, there was a change of plans. Kathy and their daughter stayed in Glendale and hosted a watch party for the game. Jeff and his younger son Jake, a sophomore at Mizzou, flew to Lexington and attended the game with a group of family friends.
It wasn’t going well. When you’re the father of a player, you want to see him play. When you’re the father of the punter, you don’t want to see him play too much. Luke made his first appearance after just three offensive snaps for the Tigers, hitting a 39-yard punt after an opening three-and-out.
Kentucky scored, Brady Cook threw an interception, Kentucky scored again. The teams traded punts after that and the Tigers got the ball back at their own 36 ten seconds into the second quarter. Six plays later they had driven to the Kentucky 33, showing signs of offensive life for the first time while trailing 14-0. But a bad snap pushed them back to the Wildcats’ 39 facing 4th and 10. Bauer came out again.
Earlier in the week, on Tuesday, Jeff Bauer had gone up to Columbia to visit his boys. He took them to dinner at Barred Owl.
“We had a great dinner, had fun, went to the Beta house (Jeff was a Beta in the 1980s, Jake is one now),” Jeff said. “He didn’t say a word about football. We just kind of talked about life and having fun.”
He sensed Luke was dealing with a lot of stress. He didn’t push it. He just wanted to spend a night with his sons and give them a break from the pressure of being a college student and a college football player. He told Luke if he was dealing with any anxiety to talk to Cook, Mizzou’s starting quarterback and one of Bauer’s best friends.
“That’s the kid to talk to,” Jeff said. “Because, unfortunately, he’s dealt with a lot of it.”
But all that was four days past when Luke lined up on Missouri’s side of midfield to punt the ball back to Kentucky. The focus now was hang time and pinning the Wildcat offense inside its own ten-yard line. Or so his dad--and pretty much everyone else--thought.
Missouri had other ideas. They’d worked on the play all week in practice. The Missouri coaches had noticed on film that one of Kentucky’s outside blockers on punt returns had a tendency to turn his head and look back toward the kick. They saw an opening.
“When we decided to run it, I was like, ‘alright, this is actually happening and I’m going to throw it as far as I can,’” Bauer said.
As Bauer took the snap, freshman Marquis Johnson burst off the line of scrimmage on the left side of the formation as one of Missouri’s outside gunners. Johnson boasts perhaps the best speed on the Missouri roster and has been a consistent deep threat in the passing game, averaging 29.8 yards on nine catches this season. Brader, watching the game in St. Louis, knew immediately something was up.
“I mean he didn’t give it away until he threw the ball,” Brader said. “When he receives the ball, you can tell he’s not going to punt it if you know what you’re looking for.
“He put his hips back. When he took that first step, instead of walking into it he made sure he secured the snap first and then he took the snap instead of stepping into the snap.”
Bauer raised up, turned to his left and fired the ball from midfield. Johnson caught it at the Kentucky 14, kept his balance and jogged into the end zone. Kentucky 14, Mizzou 7. Momentum flipped. Game changed.
“Down 14-0, you know, what do you got to lose at that point?” Mizzou head coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “So we said ‘let’s roll it’ and Luke made an unbelievable throw and Marquis made a great catch.”
“I kind of blacked out,” Luke said. “Right when I saw him catch it and then realized he was in the end zone, I was like, ‘Holy…I’ve got to go celebrate.’"
Jeff and Jake Bauer were in the corner of the stands at Kroger Field, packed into the small section reserved for the pocket of Missouri fans at Kentucky’s Homecoming game.
"You’re pretty far away and I couldn’t really see until I saw all the replays,” he said. “I was just amazed. It was a hell of a catch and it was a good throw.
“I was (yelling) ‘Oh my God, he’s my son! They’re like ‘you’re the punter’s dad?’”
The play started a 38-7 avalanche for Mizzou, which beat the Wildcats for just the second time in nine seasons to move to 6-1 on the year before their own Homecoming game this weekend against South Carolina.
The list of plays that flip a game—and maybe a season—isn’t that long. Sonny Riccio to Victor Sesay against Nebraska. Gahn McGaffie on the opening kickoff against Oklahoma. T.J. Moe to beat San Diego State. Bud Sasser to L’Damian Washington at Georgia. Michael Sam and Shane Ray in the Cotton Bowl.
Luke Bauer’s name is now alongside those in Mizzou history.
“It hasn’t really come to my mind like that’s one of the craziest plays that we’ve seen in a while,” Luke said. “I can’t even really put it into words, but it happened and I’m going to remember it the rest of my life.
“I feel like I'm on top of the world.”
“It was so surreal,” Jeff said. “All my friends were saying that could go down in history. Hopefully he doesn’t have to buy a beer in Columbia.”
Columbia was always where Luke Bauer was going to play. Well, if he played. Luke wasn’t a football player growing up. He played soccer. He pitched. He was a four-handicap in golf. Luke’s grandfather, Kathy’s dad, played at Mizzou for a year before transferring to Rolla. His paternal grandfather played at Benedictine. Jeff’s brother had “a cup of coffee” with the Kansas City Chiefs and his nephew was a four-year starter at Penn. Another nephew, Andy Bauer, was a four-star offensive line recruit who signed with Mizzou out of DeSmet in 2014 before injuries forced him to quit playing football.
“They gave him shit all the time because he was the skinny long kid who was a really good athlete, really good golfer,” Jeff said of the football playing Bauers.
“I think the kid probably has a club head speed of 150 miles an hour,” Brader said. “He told me he keeps breaking the shaft on his driver.”
Luke played tight end his freshman year at DeSmet. But he loved soccer and went back to that sport. DeSmet head coach Robert Steeples told Luke the football team needed a kicker and needed him to come back.
Luke agreed and returned to be the Spartans’ kicker. He went to Brader, who had signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars as a free agent punter out of college in 2005 before injuries sent him into coaching, and Neal Rackers, the former kicker for the Cincinnati Bengals. They run the special teams division at Elite Football Academy and have worked with more than 20 college kickers and punters including Detroit Lions punter Jack Fox, a Ladue Horton Watkins grad, and New Orleans Saints rookie kicker Blake Grupe, who’s from Sedalia Smith-Cotton.
“This kid wants to kick,” Brader said. “I said you’re not gonna kick, you’re gonna be a punter. You’re missing your calling.”
Brader said punters tend to be longer athletes with longer legs. Placekickers are more compact. Bauer was about 6-foot-1 at the time he started working with Brader. He grew to 6-foot-3 by the time he finished high school and is listed on Mizzou’s roster at 6-foot-5, 211 pounds.
But Bauer didn’t want to punt. After the initial meeting, Brader didn’t see him for a year and a half. The two ran into each other after the layoff and Brader asked Bauer when he was coming back to lessons.
“A couple weeks later he was back,” Brader recalled. “He was starting to work and train and ‘I’m gonna put some time into this, I want to be good.’ All of a sudden Mizzou was calling and he was like ‘all right, I want to be good at this.’ Since then the kid has put more time into perfecting his craft than almost anybody we coach.”
Bauer had some opportunities to play at smaller schools. But he had his sights set on big-time Division One football. It was FBS or nothing as far as he was concerned. He got some looks from Michigan, but eventually narrowed his choices to preferred walk-on opportunities at Ole Miss, TCU or Mizzou.
“He went to every home game when I went to a home game…He always loved Mizzou,” Jeff said. “He always wanted to go to Mizzou and it was my dream and my wife’s dream.”
“Being close to family, that was one big thing that I liked,” Luke said.
So Mizzou it was. Bauer redshirted during the 2020 season, but due to COVID that year didn’t count toward anyone’s eligibility. He sat again in 2021. And 2022. And the start of 2023. He waited his turn. He’s punted 11 times. One of them was a 17-yarder against LSU. His next one went 73 yards. Brader says he can be a pro.
“I’ve seen a lot of punters and he’s top ten of all the guys I’ve seen including, who I’ve played with,” the coach said. “He has everything you need.”
Most of the time, nobody really notices the punter unless something has gone wrong. But now Luke Bauer’s name is part of Mizzou history. It has nothing to do with his right leg and everything to do with his right arm.
Kathy Bauer was watching the game at home in St. Louis. She told KSDK-TV she was “annoying old lady screaming.” She tried to call Jeff in Lexington. A lot. He couldn’t hear her. They finally talked right after the game ended as Jeff and Jake made their way outside the Missouri locker room to wait for Luke and his teammates to come out before they got on the bus to catch their flight back to Columbia.
“We both had a tear in our eye,” Jeff said. “I just couldn’t stop hugging him.”
That’s not unusual for Jeff, who admits he cries a lot. Luke said it still happens every time he leaves home in Glendale to return to Columbia after a weekend or a break. But even the younger Bauer appreciated the meeting in Lexington.
“It was special,” Luke said. “I can’t even put it into words. I know I couldn’t stop smiling at my dad and my brother. It was very special.”
Brader got a text from Fox, the Lions’ second-team all-pro.
“Second person to text me. ‘Did you see that pass?’"
Luke said he had more than 200 text messages after the game and “on Instagram there was a lot more.” Among the messages was one from former Tiger quarterback James Franklin.
“That was pretty cool because I grew up a Mizzou fan and I idolized him growing up,” Luke said.
Jeff estimated he and Kathy had received 800 text messages in the hours after the game.
“Maybe 300, 400 times,” Jeff said when asked how many times he’s watched the replay. “I’m not kidding. I keep getting emails and I talk about it. At work people are talking about it, friends and family.
Jeff doesn’t want to talk about his health. He doesn’t want this story to be about him. Like anyone battling cancer, he says some days are harder than others. About once a minute during a 20-minute phone conversation he says his son is the story.
“We’re just proud that he’s part of the Tiger family and it’s more about him and the fans than it is about anything else,” he said. “I just don’t want to take any spotlight.”
But Jeff knows his chances to see Luke play aren’t unlimited. His cancer is Stage 4. He’s going to every game he can as long as he can. Luke doesn't talk about it much, but he knows it too.
“Last week after the LSU game he came back to the tailgate and went straight to the van and sat with his dad,” Brader said. “A lot of what he’s doing right now I really do think that he is making sure his dad is seeing a lot of this. It meant more to him to be on the field this year, there was probably a little bit more fight to be on the field this season.”
“I’d say it does,” Luke said when asked if this season means more to him because of his dad’s health. “I don’t talk to my dad that much about it. I just try to stay positive.”
Jeff uses the word “believe” with both of his sons on a regular basis. He frequently reminds them to believe and be optimistic when he talks to them or texts with them. That optimism is something that Luke has tried to hold on to.
“It means the world to me,” Luke said of his dad's message. “He pushed me to come out and start playing football. Senior year of high school I didn’t think I was going to come out and play football. He convinced me to. Ever since then I’ve respected the way he pushed me to come out.”
It all led to Saturday night and a memory Luke, his dad--and a whole lot of other people--aren't going to forget for a long, long time.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be tired of watching it,” Jeff said. “It’s once in a lifetime.”
Stay up to date on all the Mizzou news with your premium subscription
Talk about this story and more in The Tigers' Lair
Make sure you're caught up on all the Tiger news and headlines
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for video and live streaming coverage
