Believe it or not, #collegekickers used to be a trending topic on damn-near every college football Saturday. 

It’s easy to forget that now, in an age when football programs have specialists with bazooka legs and pinpoint accuracy, and 50-plus-yard makes feel like an afterthought. But not long ago, the smallest and most mortal guys on the team were often ridiculed for missing kicks the public deemed gimmes.

Just ask former Oregon State kicker Alexis Serna. 

Back in 2004, Serna and the Beavers traveled to Baton Rouge to take on defending national champs LSU at night. Before kickoff, a nasty storm rolled in, leaving the field sloppy and tattered. The game was ordinary, right up until the moment it wasn’t.

One thing made this game memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Serna, a walk-on kicker out of Fontana, California, missed not one, not two, but three extra points that night. The Beavers lost by one point in overtime. 

Fast-forward twenty-two years, and Serna is still part of the Beavers’ football program, helping players prepare for life after the game. He’s been through a hard version of that, and it all goes back to that night in Baton Rouge.

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Serna vividly remembers every detail of the worst night of his career.

He remembers the three missed point-after attempts. He remembers crying and throwing his helmet on national TV. He remembers the ESPN cameras in the locker room, how he couldn’t look his teammates in the eyes, and what coach Mike Riley said to him in the aftermath of his living nightmare. 

“Coach Riley just said, ‘There’s nothing I can tell you in this moment to feel better. You’ve just got to bounce back.’” 

After Serna’s difficult season-opening outing, he lost the kicking job the following week. But he gained something much more important: a new perspective. 

Days after the worst night of his career, Serna’s kicking coach reminded him that football is just a game, and that a lot of people are dealing with much worse than missing a few kicks in front of a packed stadium.

Then he received a letter that changed his mindset and created a bond for life.

Almost seven hours away, at Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Washington, 12-year-old Austan Pierce was in the midst of a nasty battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare childhood bone cancer. An avid football fan, Pierce and his doctor routinely placed quarter bets on football games. 

In the lead-up to the LSU game, Pierce wagered twenty-five cents on the Beavers to spring an upset over Top 5 LSU. 

Pierce watched the game and saw how things played out for Serna. The next day, Pierce’s doctor asked him if he wanted to write Serna a letter of encouragement. He jumped at the opportunity. 

“Reading the letter, it put life into perspective,” Serna recalled. “Here’s this 12-year-old going through chemotherapy in the hospital. He said, ‘I have bad days and get up. And if I can do it, so can you.’ I took that to heart.” 

Serna was so moved by Pierce’s words that, before every game, he’d write an “A” on his left thumb and a “P” on his right thumb. Every time he’d grab the ball, Pierce’s words of encouragement were top of mind. 

“It was a reminder that I was blessed for the situation that I was in,” Serna said. 

By 2007, Pierce had endured 13 rounds of chemotherapy, 31 days of radiation, 24 blood transfusions, two pelvis replacements, a colon surgery, and had one of his legs amputated, according to an article in The Spokesman-Review.

Pierce now lives in Dallas, Texas. He and Serna still text from time to time. 

Serna had the worst night any college kicker has ever had but refused to let that define him.

“Funny enough, it was immediately after that LSU game that I got my swagger back,” Serna said. “...It came back immediately. I got back to myself quickly.” 

With a new perspective on life, Serna took the challenge of winning back the kicking job head-on. First, he won the kickoff job. Then a week later, he returned to field goal and PAT duties. 

By mid-October 2004, he kicked five field goals in a 29-14 win over Washington, which included a 55-yarder. He finished the season with a conference-leading field goal percentage of 85% and was a national award semifinalist.

The very next season, he made 23 of 28 field goals and all 32 extra-point attempts en route to winning the Lou Groza Award, an honor bestowed to the nation’s top kicker. 

If you pitched Serna’s story as a Hollywood movie script, executives would tell you it’s too unbelievable.

How does someone under so much scrutiny come back from that? In what world does a college kicker miss three PATs on a national stage and have the fortitude to rebound? How did the smallest guy on the team go from throwing his helmet, crying on the Death Valley grass, and being unable to look his teammates in the eyes to becoming the best kicker in college football 15 months later? 

“You almost have to have a level of being a little delusional,” Serna said with a laugh. “...I would’ve been considered the worst kicker in college football after the LSU game, and then 15 months later, I walked onto the stage as the best kicker in college football. That doesn’t happen.” 

What was his secret? 

“You have to have an unwavering belief in yourself,” Serna said. “My will is a lot stronger than my fear of failure.” 

Many years after his illustrious playing career, Serna still bleeds orange and black. 

He now works for the Oregon State athletic department as the director of Beyond Football, where he helps Beaver players prepare for and transition to life after football. 

Serna is quick to tell you about how much being an Oregon State football player meant to him. It helped make him the leader, the father, and the man he is today. He says he feels indebted to the Corvallis community and loves helping players navigate their post-playing careers.

“I want to take care of these guys how I would want someone to take care of my boys,” Serna said. “...I’m very fortunate to be back on campus to give back to the university that gave so much to me.” 

As part of his role, he now has a front-row seat to the Oregon State football renaissance happening under new coach JaMarcus Shephard. After years of hardship, the football program is arguably the best story in college football this season. 

The Beavers have an exciting head coach, a flamethrower quarterback in Braden Atkinson, and the best freshman wide receiver in college football in Jesse Legree. 

“There’s a lot of buzz and excitement happening right now, and I want us to see them continue it,” he said. “You want to show people how great your school is.”

Kickers don’t always trend on Saturdays like they used to. 

Serna did for all the wrong reasons. What he did next got a fraction of the attention: he never missed a PAT again. 144 out of 144. No hashtag for that.

These days, he’s still in Corvallis helping football players figure out what comes after the game, something he knows a thing or two about.

College Football Week 9 has the look of a quiet weekend before the November madness begins, but we're not buying the idea that everything will go according to plan. With quarterback injuries, vulnerable contenders, tricky road games, and conference races getting tighter, there's plenty that could go sideways.

In this college football podcast episode, we preview the biggest games of Week 9 and make our picks against the spread. We start with Arizona traveling to Texas Tech, where the Red Raiders are trying to recover from a disappointing loss to Cincinnati. Can Texas Tech get back on track, or is Arizona capable of making things even more complicated in the Big 12?

We also dive into Georgia-Florida and Ohio State-USC, two games with very different kinds of intrigue. Can Florida make life uncomfortable for Georgia? How much does Ohio State's quarterback situation change the equation against a USC team with plenty of questions of its own? And what should we make of Oregon as the Ducks prepare for another challenging Big Ten matchup?

Then we shake up our usual Quadfather format with a draft of the most interesting games from each Saturday viewing window. We explore potential upsets, intriguing matchups, and teams that might be running out of answers as the College Football Playoff race heats up. Plus, Dan unveils his wonderfully ridiculous nickname for Week 9, we discuss Halloween logistics, and we close with our weekly locks.

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