2020 Mountain West Football Top 50 Players: #41, Colorado State P Ryan Stonehouse

Colorado State’s punter is one of the nation’s best. He finally earns a spot on our list of the Mountain West’s best football players.

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2020 Mountain West Football Top 50 Players: #41, Colorado State P Ryan Stonehouse

The Rams punter is one of the nation’s best. He finally earns a spot on our list of the Mountain West’s best football players.

Contact/Follow @MattK_FS & @MWCwire

This punter is a legitimate star.

2019 was a boom season for specialists all across the Mountain West, but for all of the standout performances, everyone was still chasing the next player on our countdown of the conference’s top athletes.

Ryan Stonehouse has been every bit as good as advertised since arriving at Colorado State as the nation’s top punter recruit in 2017, earning first-team all-conference honors in each of the past two seasons. He’s finished in the top ten among all FBS punters by yards per kick in all three of his campaigns and 34% of his career punts have pinned opponents inside the 20-yard line, though he and the Rams’ punt coverage unit pushed that production to a new level last fall: Beyond averaging 46.4 yards per punt (9th in the FBS), Colorado State ranked sixth in the nation with 42.5 net yards per punt.

By the time Stonehouse wraps up his senior year, he’ll leave Fort Collins as easily the best punter in conference history and, honestly, he probably already is. He’s already on pace to shatter the current record for career yards per punt (currently held by BYU’s Matt Payne) by a yard and a half and he has a strong case as the odds-on favorite among any Mountain West player to bring home national hardware this season.

The next time someone tries to tell you that punters don’t matter, tell them to watch Ryan Stonehouse.

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