“I think if we had had to wait three or four more hours, I don’t think it would’ve been possible,” Smyth said after the game, noting he was surprised and emotional that so many of his family members were able to make the trip.
But then on Sunday it started to feel like if Smyth scored for free pints, not when. The first quarter passed, no opportunities for Smyth. When the Saints offense finally got into field goal range on the last drive of the first half, rookie quarterback Tyler Shough threw an interception. In the third quarter, New Orleans scored its first touchdown, but down 16-0, chose to go for two instead of kicking an extra point. Smyth waited, and so did his legion of fans and family in County Down.
“All his best friends were here,” Laverty said of the crowded pub. “His grammy and granddad were here. One uncle and two aunties were here as well.”
From his seats in the end zone at Hard Rock Stadium with Smyth’s family, Leader tried to stay positive as the fourth quarter dwindled away. “Something will transpire,” he told Smyth’s parents. “Most kickers need to get to the 35-yard line to be in field goal range, but I know the Saints were backing it up to the mid-40s,” Leader said. “With Charlie’s leg strength, he has more yards than what most people do.”
Then, with 6:13 left in the fourth quarter, Leader was proven right. The Dolphins had scored another three points, and New Orleans was down 19-8 needed to make up for that field goal, so Smyth trotted out for his turn. It would be a 56-yard first field goal attempt. A big distance for a debut kick, and it had been raining on and off all game, though that was nothing new for an Irishman.
He sent it through the uprights like he’d been kicking a football for a lifetime, not just two years.
“Ice cold in his veins,” Shough said. “He came in there [today] and made a really tough kick because we’ve got to be able to convert on that.”
“That kick would have been good from 65-67 odd yards,” Leader said after the game. “I was just debriefing with him there, and he was saying, it just felt so natural. And then the ball just flew a mile.”
The crowd at Laverty’s jumped up and down and cheered. With three points to Smyth’s name and the Saints back in a one-possession (eight point) game, Laverty treated everyone to their first round of free pints, with the majority opting for Smyth’s drink of choice: a Guinness.
Laverty says Mayobridge is a sporting town (everyone loves career Grand Slam golfer Rory McIlroy) but Smyth was often the one person requesting to watch NFL RedZone at his bar. People are now interested in the NFL there because of Smyth, but the most popular football and sport is the Gaelic kind, where players run, carry, pass, bounce and kick the ball.
Laverty used to coach Smyth on his Gaelic Mayobridge village team when Smyth was a teen and coming up in the Gaelic football ranks. “He just was a talent with his kicking off the ground, ” Laverty says, “You could see that he just was a talent.”
By December 2023, Smyth proved he had enough raw kicking talent to earn a spot in the NFL’s International Player Pathway Program. After two impressive workouts at the NFL scouting combine and the IPP pro day in 2024, he was signed to the Saints practice squad, and has been developing in the background for the past two seasons.
The Saints knew they had potential in Smyth, who went 4-for-4 with a 52-yard field goal in a preseason game this season. He also made a 65-yard field goal in a 2024 training camp practice held at Tulane University.
That kick sold the Saints on what one team source called “huge upside,” at the time, but they needed to see more consistency from him. They still felt he had room to grow in 2025, where he struggled at the beginning of training camp.
His competitor Blake Grupe missed only one of 40 kick attempts in training camp practices this summer, while unofficial reporting had Smyth at just 25-for-39. The Saints knew Smyth, who was still learning on the job, needed time, and they came up with a development plan in camp to make sure he had every resource he needed to grow.
“Those cumulative reps of never doing it in high school, never doing it in college, it’s really a big deal,” Special teams coordinator Phil Galiano said this week. “… Him just having to figure out how to walk the ball off the right way and his steps to approach was a really big deal. It’s something that he’s got down where we want it now, but when he first got here, it was never the same, he was stepping on himself.”
Galiano said this week that the Saints sent Smyth to Dallas midseason to work with a kicking coach on some of those technical aspects.
“The difference now to then [April 2024] is like the difference between red and blue to be honest with you,” Galiano said.
But because Smyth lacked those “cumulative reps,” the Saints wanted to be sure he could handle the pressure of kicking in an NFL game. So when Grupe, the incumbent kicker, missed two field goal attempts in Week 12, (eight misses on the season and last in the league in field goal percentage), New Orleans worked out two other kickers. Smyth didn’t automatically take Grupe’s place.
“I wanted to see Charlie with some competition and a little bit of pressure on him, with some other guys that have kicked in this league,” Galiano told reporters Thursday. “I thought it was fair to him to be a part of the competition. I just wanted to see how he would react and put him in a little adversity situation.”
Shough said that the team saw Smyth’s calm demeanor, his “neutrality” during the kicking competition throughout the week. “He did a really good job just coming in.”
Smyth beat out Cade York, and Justin Tucker, a NFL kicker he used to watch when he searched the internet for illegal NFL streams or snuck out of his house late at night to go to his neighbor’s to use their wifi to watch games.
In April 2024, when Smyth first signed with New Orleans, he said he thought he had a chance to compete for the starting job. “I didn’t make all these sacrifices just to be happy to sit on a practice squad,” Smyth said then.
Postgame on Sunday he said that the week was emotionally “strange” because he is friends with Grupe and learned a lot from him, but that he’s felt he’s felt ready for a starting role for a long time.
“I was absolutely buzzing.” he said. “It was just exciting to get the opportunity now and to be honest, I’m kind of hiding it a little bit. I was absolutely positive.”
“He’s actually more at ease this year,” Leo Smyth said after the game. “Last year, he didn’t know anybody and it was a culture shock. And he’s well settled this year, and very confident in himself.”
The free pints at Laverty’s did not stop with the 56-yarder. With 1:17 left in the fourth quarter, Shough threw a pick on a two-point conversion attempt that would have tied the game. Dolphins safety Minkah Fitzpatrick ran it all the way back to score two points. Now down 21-17 and needing a touchdown to win, the Saints tried an onside kick.
Smyth sent his attempt spinning horizontally to the left sideline, where Saints receiver Devaughn Vele caught it, and the officiating crew originally ruled a Saints recovery. The play went into a booth review, and the Fox broadcast crew didn’t think that the ball had traveled 10 yards — or been touched by a Miami player — before Vele touched it, which would mean Miami’s possession.
Back in Mayobridge, Laverty shouted to his pub patrons: “If Charlie gets it, there’s another free drink!”
In the end zone seats, Leader had to explain to the very confused Smyths what on earth was an onside kick attempt.
“I’m not up to speed with all the rules,” Leo Smyth said. “I’ve seen people attempt it, but I wasn’t sure what the end result would be, to be truthful.”
Now Leo Smyth knows, because after a two minute and thirty second review, referee Alan Eck confirmed the ruling on the field stood.
Only four of 42 onside kicks have been recovered this season, and one of those by an Irishman in his very first NFL game, who said he didn’t start working on onside kicks until “really just this year” with the Saints.
“It wasn’t a huge part of my routine,” Smyth said. “I started practicing them on Fridays before we would do it with the walk-through.”
Smyth said the Saints noticed something when scouting the Dolphins hands team that led them to use that type of onside kick, and they even caught their own scout team off guard with it in practice during the week.
“It’s a touch he’d have from Gaelic football,” Leader said. “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. ”
But this Sunday at 7 p.m., the crowd was only just arriving. Bar owner Colin “Coke” Laverty had to bring in four extra staffers as around 90 patrons piled in to watch local hero Charlie Smyth start his first regular-season NFL game. When the New Orleans Saints kicker scored, Laverty promised, everyone would get a free pint. He’d started to quietly plan the watch party on Friday night, before the team officially announced it, but word “started to creep through” that Smyth would get his first start. “Everybody was afraid to say anything, because we didn’t want to scupper Charlie’s chances,” Laverty told ESPN Sunday evening.
CloseKatherine TerrellESPN Staff WriterKatherine Terrell came back to ESPN to cover the New Orleans Saints in the summer of 2022. She left the company in 2019 after joining in 2016 to cover the Cincinnati Bengals. Katherine is a graduate of LSU and a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, native, and she has covered the NFL since 2013.Follow on X
Irishman Charlie Smyth’s first career FG goes for 56 yds! 🇮🇪📺: FOX | @NFLUKIRE pic.twitter.com/qmti6LNoIJ
That night, Smyth’s parents, Leo and Julie, bought their flights to Miami — a one-way trip that took 23 hours (they were delayed in Chicago due to snow) and got them to The 305 in the nick of time — as did his two sisters and his kicking coach Tadgh Leader, who first discovered Charlie at an American football kicking clinic he ran in Dublin in August 2023.