Why does Brian Daboll hate the Irish?
Among the many failed decisions the soon-to-be-former Giants head coach made on what was a bloody awful Sunday for his home side, none were more noticed than Daboll’s bypassing extra-point kicks in favor of two-point conversions in the fourth quarter—not once, but twice. Daboll kept kicker Jude McAtamney on the sidelines, only to watch poor and poorly supported quarterback Daniel Jones muck things up both times, and see his team lose precious points in a 27-22 loss to the Commanders.
Going for two is the kind of thing that bold, analytically savvy teams get praised for these days, but the Giants are proof of what happens when analytics meet the league's worst red-zone offense: New York is now 0-6 on two-point tries this season. Even with two-point failure all but guaranteed, Daboll elected to leave his kicker on the sideline.
Before being forsaken, McAtamney, a 24-year-old former Gaelic footballer from Swatragh in County Derry, Northern Ireland, who was making his NFL debut, was perfect on his lone field goal attempt, a 31-yarder, and his one extra-point try. He also got touchbacks on four of his five kickoffs. No Ireland-born player had scored a point in the NFL in 39 years. (Technically Northern Ireland is part of the U.K. and not the Republic of Ireland, but before GAA football matches in Derry they play the national anthem of the Republic, and not “God Save the King,” and McAtamney, like all Gaelic athletes, is considered Irish, because England is Satan.) But for Daboll’s boners, McAtamney’s day would have been even bigger.
McAtamney had learned to boot a ball while playing Gaelic football as a teen back home. His 20-and-under county squad won an Ulster provincial championship in 2018. McAtamney has said his inspiration to give American football a shot came after seeing a Kerry man, David Shanahan, go from playing GAA to punting for Georgia Tech.
To chase that dream, McAtamney contacted the same Australian talent agency that helped Shanahan get to the USA, which led to him a gig in 2021 as both punter and placekicker for Chowan College, an NCAA D-II school in North Carolina. McAtamney put up middling field-goal stats in his first year of American football, making just six of his 10 attempts at Chowan. But he was 47-for-47 on extra points, and showed off a big leg on kickoffs. And when he entered the transfer portal after that season, he moved way up the college football food chain, catching on with Rutgers of the Big Ten. McAtamney’s FG numbers improved only slightly for the Scarlet Knights in 2022, nailing 12 of his 18 attempts, and converting 23-of-24 extra points. He was relegated to kickoff-only duties for his senior season in 2023 by Rutgers coach Greg Schiano.
But McAtamney’s form was warm on a pro day kicking for NFL scouts, as he went a perfect 10-for-10, good enough to get a free-agent contract with the Giants after the 2024 draft. Two other Irishmen—kicker Charlie Smyth of the Saints and punter Dan Whelan of Green Bay—were also signed by NFL squads, thanks in part to incentives provided by the league's International Player Pathway program, a scheme to bring more international diversity to its player rolls.
The Giants stuck McAtamney on the practice squad. The team has had two well-traveled veteran kickers on the roster this season, Graham Gano and Greg Joseph. But Gano tore his hamstring chasing Austin Ekeler against the Commanders in a 21-18 loss in the second week of the season. The Giants had three touchdowns on that September day, but the special teams didn’t score a point after Gano got hurt. First, punter Jamie Gillan shanked an extra point while subbing for Gano, and then Daboll went for two-point conversions on both subsequent Giants TDs. Neither succeeded. The Giants three failures to convert provided Washington with its margin of victory. Gano has yet to return to the active roster. And then Joseph went down with what was described as an “abdomen injury” in practice last week. So on Friday, word leaked that McAtamney would make his stateside debut.
The Derry man’s boffo performance yesterday was big news across the pond. “McAtamney perfect in NFL debut for Giants,” said a headline from RTE, Ireland’s government-owned news agency. The Irish Times did a report from, of course, a bar in Swatragh. “Whenever he scored the place was jumping,” former Gaelic football club teammate Michael O’Kane told the paper. In the Times article, Kane recalled being awed by his mate’s leg strength as a teen, a time “when it looked as if the flame-haired lad was kicking balls from a different postcode.”
“I can still remember him at the age of 13,” Kane said, “stroking over 45s and the distance he got on them, there was plenty of space to spare as they sailed over.”
American media, meanwhile, focused more on Daboll’s backfiring extra-point decisions than McAtamney’s perfection. Multiple reporters pressed the Canadian-born head coach at his post game press conference about why he didn’t just take the points the Irish kid surely would have brought his team.
“Analytics,” Daboll huffed.
The New York Post put the two-point-conversion flops in a headline of one of its game stories: “Lousy two-point conversion plays aren’t even close.” While assigning grades to the offense, defense, special teams and coaching staffs, the paper cited Daboll’s extra-point flops while handing him a “D,” as in “Derry.”
Hell, Daboll probably still calls it “Londonderry.”
