Charlie Successfully Kicks Football

George Best was once the only man from Northern Ireland to make a stir kicking a ball in America. But now the NFL is rife with Irish kickers. Last season Jude McAtamney hit a FG for the Giants. (It went less well for him this year.) And on Sunday Charlie Smyth joined him with a successful kick of his own, joining Neil O’Donoghue in the growing fraternity of Irish-born NFL kickers.

Smyth was previously just another guy in the booth at Super Bowl 59. During a break, announcers on the UK Sky Sports broadcast brought him in for a chat. They introduced him as a member of the New Orleans Saints—he’d spent the year on their practice squad, and signed a futures contract for the following season—and “a big fan of the NFL.”

Smyth came to the league as part of the NFL’s International Pathway Program, which gives interested teams an extra offseason roster spot in exchange for promoting the NFL’s International Pathway Program. Occasionally a player gets a cup of coffee in the league, but there have been some real successes. Eagles lineman Jordan Mailata got his start with the program and was second team All-Pro last year. Many players in the program are attempting to switch codes of football, which can be hard because other countries have stupid, incomprehensible rules that are quite different from the stupid, incomprehensible rules of American-style football. Smyth, for his part, played goalkeeper in Gaelic football. “The role of a goalkeeper, who wears the number 1 jersey in Gaelic games, is similar to other sports: to prevent the ball from entering the goal,” reads the Wikipedia entry for Gaelic football, hurling and camogie positions. This is not a job that any one player does in American football, and it certainly is not how you would describe a placekicker’s gig. But Smyth, who is listed at 6-4, 210, is figuring it out. He wears number 39.

Smyth is so Irish that he'd planned to teach the Irish language for a living, but he’s also been an longtime NFL fan, which means his heart has been with America’s stupid code of football all his life. That broadcast description of Smyth as “a big fan” was, if anything, an understatement. He was always requesting NFL RedZone at a local bar, and admitted to using pirated NFL streams to watch others (hope he had McAfee). Smyth actually sent an email to the NFL when he was 18 to ask for a tryout. (You should also do this: Address all correspondence to roger.goodell@nfl.com.)

Smyth joined the international pool in 2024, and signed with the Saints after hitting a 60-yard FG during a pro day. He made a game-winning FG during last year’s preseason. “The Saints blasted music from noted Irish rock band U2 during the postgame celebration in the locker room,” the Associated Press wrote. Smyth spent last year on the team’s practice squad.

That’s where he was this season, too, until the Saints elevated him to the active roster for Sunday’s game against the Dolphins. New Orleans had cut Blake Grupe on Tuesday after he went a brutally easy to calculate 18-for-26 on his field goals attempts this season. That kind of accuracy won Neil O’Donoghue a nine-year career in the ’70s and ’80s—he only made 59 percent of his kicks, actually—but it’s not going to cut it in 2025.

So far, Smyth is the most accurate kicker of any nationality in NFL history. He sits at a patently unsustainable 100 percent on both field goals and, astoundingly, onside kicks. Smyth hit his lone FG attempt, a 56 yarder, to make it a one score game in the fourth. A touchdown pass by Tyler Shough, which is somehow the name not of an Irish folk hero but of New Orleans’ 26-year-old rookie quarterback, got the Saints within two. Minkah Fitzpatrick picked off the 2-point attempt and returned it for a 21-17 Dolphins lead, so Smyth had to attempt his first onside kick—and it worked! Devaughn Vele recovered it! The Saints were alive!

Rule changes have made onside kicks a much trickier proposition than they once were; teams are recovering less than 10 percent of them this season. To be clear, though, this one was due to the skill of the Irish. “It’s a touch he’d have from Gaelic football,” Tadgh Leader, a mentor who met Smyth at a kicking clinic in 2023, told ESPN. “It’s a natural touch on the ball to manage spin, manage the force, manage your swing plane, you have to do all these different types of things with the sport we play.”

Smyth’s parents and other family had made it to Florida for the game and 90 patrons backed a bar in County Down to see Smyth make his NFL debut. They got free pints for both the field goal and the onside kick.

You know how this story ends. The Saints don’t even have a trinity of wins this season and couldn’t take advantage. The Dolphins stopped Shough on a fourth-down QB sneak with 35 seconds left on Miami’s 36. Kellen Moore should’ve known that Shough’s no Cú Chulainn.

The most famous American football kicker named Charlie is that depressed gullible bald boy from the comics; he’s never successfully connected with the ball, and there’s not much of a legacy of kicking Charlies beyond that. Chuck Nelson kicked in the ’80s, while Smyth is just the fourth Charlie to kick in the league. Charlie Baumann hit 20 field goals for Miami and New England in the early ’90s; Charlie Durkee made 52 field goals for the Saints in the ’60s and ’70s. Charlie Gogolak, the less successful of the Hungarian brothers who bought soccer-style placekicking to the NFL around the same time, also had 52 career field goals. Smyth has a ways to go to become Top Charlie, but he’s only 24. Think how much better his cold calls to NFL teams will be now that he has a made FG on his resume!