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An article from the Athletic this morning featured 3 kickers from Ireland and Gaelic Football getting their shot to the NFL through the IPP program includes Smyth. The article leans heavily towards the guy that started it all, Tadhg Leader, and his journey before starting a company to promote kickers and punters from Ireland.
An interesting tidbit from the article that has been discussed in this thread is kicking in front of large crowds. These guys have experience kicking in front of crowds upwards of 80,000 people and play in a sport as amateur's where they don't get paid. What they lack is experience kicking a football and doing so in game situations. It's an opportunity to do what they love to do and get paid to do it and would be a dream come true for these lads. It would also be a huge win for the NFL to expand their viewership from abroad where in this case these lads are already homeland hero's. Any one of these guys could instantly generate upwards of 5 million new Irish fans to the NFL.
After reading the entire article I came away thinking that in a short span of time we will begin to see some of these kickers and punters from Ireland begin to make their way into the American game of football, both in college and the pros. I've been on record stating that Grupe will retain his starting job and won't be threatened to be replaced by Smyth or any other inexperienced Gaelic Football kicker. However, I came away from this read believing that the learning curve for these Gaelic Football kickers from Ireland will be a quick one and in short time they will get their opportunities to show what they can do playing American football.
Apr 11, 2024
TAMPA, Fla. — A tall lad with tousled brown hair and ruddy cheeks flipped through the pages of his light green leather notebook, looking at “wee reminders” to get his head right.
Killer mindset
YOU ABSOLUTELY DESERVE THIS
Teams are watching me. Brilliant!
The kicking workout was the grand finale of the NFL’s International Player Pathway pro day this Wednesday afternoon at the University of South Florida. The event featured the first kickers and punters in the IPP program, which since 2017 has sought to provide players outside of North America with opportunities to play in the league.
Three of the kickers were plucked straight from Gaelic football, Ireland’s most popular sport. Charlie Smyth, 22, of Down, Mark Jackson, 25, of Wicklow, and Rory Beggan, 31, of Monaghan, each left their posts as goalkeepers for their county teams this winter to give NFL kickin’ a fair go.
The lads started kicking NFL footballs this past fall, so Smyth’s wee written reminders were necessary. He stretched outside in the Florida sun before his workout, then took out his phone and watched a cutup of himself making 50-plus yard field goals at this same indoor field.
“I know I can do it here,” he said.
Smyth has been illegally streaming NFL games since he was 16. When he was 18, he sent an email to inquiries@NFL.com pitching himself as an NFL kicker. He never heard back.
This past August, during his off-time from his county team, he finally went to an American football kicking session in Dublin, “just for the craic,” he said. (For the uninitiated, “craic,” pronounced “crack,” means fun in Irish.)
The craic turned serious and led Smyth to the scouting combine, where he caught the eye of several NFL special teams coaches, then to Tampa for this second NFL audience.
GO DEEPER
NFL Draft 2024 ‘The Beast’ Guide: Dane Brugler’s scouting reports and player rankings
The Gaelic kickers were inconsistent past 50 yards in their first appearance in front of NFL teams — “I was kicking myself a bit after the combine,” Beggan said, no pun intended — so this time they wanted to prove they had the distance. When Beggan lined up from 50 yards, he banged it through. Then again from 55 and again from 60. Jackson was perfect through 45 yards and narrowly missed from 50-plus. Smyth drilled his 50-yard attempt, missed from 55, then was good from 60.
After Smyth knocked in his last long attempt, a senior NFL executive who’d been on the field said he expected at least one of the Irish guys to sign with an NFL team, a feat that once seemed outlandish.
“I have to be very honest, I didn’t expect it,” said Ravens assistant special teams coach Randy Brown.
“They were further ahead than everybody expected,” said Saints special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi. “There’s the expression, an ‘NFL leg.’ All of them have an NFL leg.”
These “Irish Gaelic” guys, as special teams coaches call them, seemed to come out of nowhere. So how the feck did they go from kicking 45s and frees to kicking field goals for NFL personnel?
The lad behind the lads is Tadhg Leader. Fair-skinned and ginger-haired and -bearded, Leader is a former professional rugby player from Galway on the west coast of Ireland. He wound up stateside with Major League Rugby in 2018, and when the pandemic hit he started kicking NFL footballs just for the craic.
Soon he started training with John Carney, the former NFL All-Pro who is fifth on the all-time scoring list. Carney encouraged Leader, then 28, to make a career out of kicking, so Leader called the IPP.
The program didn’t carry kickers and punters, so he sent his tape to NFL teams. He was told he needed more game experience, so he played in the Spring League, then European League Football before finally signing with the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 2022. In his only preseason appearance, he kicked a walk-off 35-yard game-winner.
“Life was great,” Leader said. “I thought I was going to be there for the season.”
But then Hamilton’s general manager called him in and told him he was too raw. Leader was 30 years old, and despite getting more tape, he kept hearing the same feedback.
“Well, like, where else do I get experience?” Leader said.
He tried to kick in the XFL but had issues getting a visa, so he decided to move on. “It’s looking like it’s too late for me,” he said, explaining his mindset. “Let me go home to Ireland to start a pathway that everyone else can walk.”
Last February, Leader started a business to discover Irish kicking talent and help them land college scholarships. He wanted to create a program where cost wouldn’t be a barrier, so he spent his own money at the start, including at least a thousand dollars on footballs. His family thought he’d gone mad.
“It was extremely raw,” Leader said. But in a few months, he’d helped two Irish kickers earn college scholarships and arranged a sponsorship with Delta Airlines.
While Leader was training his first class of soon-to-be collegiate kickers, NFL special teams coordinators convened with the league office to discuss an idea they’d been talking about for years: taking the specialists out of the scouting combine and creating a separate event so they could invite more players and do more kicking.
Brown, the Ravens coach, said that when they presented their vision to NFL EVP of Football operations Troy Vincent, Vincent told them he’d like to see an international component. Last April, James Cook, who runs the IPP and knew of Leader’s quick work with Irish kickers, scheduled a meeting with him at the NFL’s London office.
Leader happened to be in town on business for his day job at J.P. Morgan and snuck away to meet with Cook, who told him they were considering adding kickers and punters to the IPP. Nothing was finalized, but did he think the guys were out there? And if so, could he get them ready in time?
“The biggest barrier that exists is not the capability, but it’s the access,” Leader told Cook. “And if you guys can give access, I can get the kicking talent.”
Monaghan’s Rory Beggan kicks a free during a match against Cavan on Sunday, April 7. (Ramsey Cardy / Sportsfile via Getty Images)
There are only two sports in the world where athletes kick a ball off the grass and send it high through uprights. And the width of the posts in Gaelic football is only about three feet wider than NFL and college football goal posts.
“Kicking the ball is part of our DNA growing up here in Ireland,” Leader said. “Americans throw baseballs, basketballs, footballs. We don’t do that. We pass those balls with our feet, so now we’ve just been given a new ball to use our feet with …
“It’s the most perfect of synergies, just no one’s ever connected the dots.”
Full Article Below:
theathletic.com
An interesting tidbit from the article that has been discussed in this thread is kicking in front of large crowds. These guys have experience kicking in front of crowds upwards of 80,000 people and play in a sport as amateur's where they don't get paid. What they lack is experience kicking a football and doing so in game situations. It's an opportunity to do what they love to do and get paid to do it and would be a dream come true for these lads. It would also be a huge win for the NFL to expand their viewership from abroad where in this case these lads are already homeland hero's. Any one of these guys could instantly generate upwards of 5 million new Irish fans to the NFL.
After reading the entire article I came away thinking that in a short span of time we will begin to see some of these kickers and punters from Ireland begin to make their way into the American game of football, both in college and the pros. I've been on record stating that Grupe will retain his starting job and won't be threatened to be replaced by Smyth or any other inexperienced Gaelic Football kicker. However, I came away from this read believing that the learning curve for these Gaelic Football kickers from Ireland will be a quick one and in short time they will get their opportunities to show what they can do playing American football.
Why Gaelic footballers have the NFL’s attention: ‘These lads can kick balls’
Kalyn KahlerApr 11, 2024
TAMPA, Fla. — A tall lad with tousled brown hair and ruddy cheeks flipped through the pages of his light green leather notebook, looking at “wee reminders” to get his head right.
Killer mindset
YOU ABSOLUTELY DESERVE THIS
Teams are watching me. Brilliant!
The kicking workout was the grand finale of the NFL’s International Player Pathway pro day this Wednesday afternoon at the University of South Florida. The event featured the first kickers and punters in the IPP program, which since 2017 has sought to provide players outside of North America with opportunities to play in the league.
Three of the kickers were plucked straight from Gaelic football, Ireland’s most popular sport. Charlie Smyth, 22, of Down, Mark Jackson, 25, of Wicklow, and Rory Beggan, 31, of Monaghan, each left their posts as goalkeepers for their county teams this winter to give NFL kickin’ a fair go.
The lads started kicking NFL footballs this past fall, so Smyth’s wee written reminders were necessary. He stretched outside in the Florida sun before his workout, then took out his phone and watched a cutup of himself making 50-plus yard field goals at this same indoor field.
“I know I can do it here,” he said.
Smyth has been illegally streaming NFL games since he was 16. When he was 18, he sent an email to inquiries@NFL.com pitching himself as an NFL kicker. He never heard back.
This past August, during his off-time from his county team, he finally went to an American football kicking session in Dublin, “just for the craic,” he said. (For the uninitiated, “craic,” pronounced “crack,” means fun in Irish.)
The craic turned serious and led Smyth to the scouting combine, where he caught the eye of several NFL special teams coaches, then to Tampa for this second NFL audience.
GO DEEPER
NFL Draft 2024 ‘The Beast’ Guide: Dane Brugler’s scouting reports and player rankings
The Gaelic kickers were inconsistent past 50 yards in their first appearance in front of NFL teams — “I was kicking myself a bit after the combine,” Beggan said, no pun intended — so this time they wanted to prove they had the distance. When Beggan lined up from 50 yards, he banged it through. Then again from 55 and again from 60. Jackson was perfect through 45 yards and narrowly missed from 50-plus. Smyth drilled his 50-yard attempt, missed from 55, then was good from 60.
After Smyth knocked in his last long attempt, a senior NFL executive who’d been on the field said he expected at least one of the Irish guys to sign with an NFL team, a feat that once seemed outlandish.
“I have to be very honest, I didn’t expect it,” said Ravens assistant special teams coach Randy Brown.
“They were further ahead than everybody expected,” said Saints special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi. “There’s the expression, an ‘NFL leg.’ All of them have an NFL leg.”
These “Irish Gaelic” guys, as special teams coaches call them, seemed to come out of nowhere. So how the feck did they go from kicking 45s and frees to kicking field goals for NFL personnel?
The lad behind the lads is Tadhg Leader. Fair-skinned and ginger-haired and -bearded, Leader is a former professional rugby player from Galway on the west coast of Ireland. He wound up stateside with Major League Rugby in 2018, and when the pandemic hit he started kicking NFL footballs just for the craic.
Soon he started training with John Carney, the former NFL All-Pro who is fifth on the all-time scoring list. Carney encouraged Leader, then 28, to make a career out of kicking, so Leader called the IPP.
The program didn’t carry kickers and punters, so he sent his tape to NFL teams. He was told he needed more game experience, so he played in the Spring League, then European League Football before finally signing with the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 2022. In his only preseason appearance, he kicked a walk-off 35-yard game-winner.
“Life was great,” Leader said. “I thought I was going to be there for the season.”
But then Hamilton’s general manager called him in and told him he was too raw. Leader was 30 years old, and despite getting more tape, he kept hearing the same feedback.
“Well, like, where else do I get experience?” Leader said.
He tried to kick in the XFL but had issues getting a visa, so he decided to move on. “It’s looking like it’s too late for me,” he said, explaining his mindset. “Let me go home to Ireland to start a pathway that everyone else can walk.”
Last February, Leader started a business to discover Irish kicking talent and help them land college scholarships. He wanted to create a program where cost wouldn’t be a barrier, so he spent his own money at the start, including at least a thousand dollars on footballs. His family thought he’d gone mad.
“It was extremely raw,” Leader said. But in a few months, he’d helped two Irish kickers earn college scholarships and arranged a sponsorship with Delta Airlines.
While Leader was training his first class of soon-to-be collegiate kickers, NFL special teams coordinators convened with the league office to discuss an idea they’d been talking about for years: taking the specialists out of the scouting combine and creating a separate event so they could invite more players and do more kicking.
Brown, the Ravens coach, said that when they presented their vision to NFL EVP of Football operations Troy Vincent, Vincent told them he’d like to see an international component. Last April, James Cook, who runs the IPP and knew of Leader’s quick work with Irish kickers, scheduled a meeting with him at the NFL’s London office.
Leader happened to be in town on business for his day job at J.P. Morgan and snuck away to meet with Cook, who told him they were considering adding kickers and punters to the IPP. Nothing was finalized, but did he think the guys were out there? And if so, could he get them ready in time?
“The biggest barrier that exists is not the capability, but it’s the access,” Leader told Cook. “And if you guys can give access, I can get the kicking talent.”
Monaghan’s Rory Beggan kicks a free during a match against Cavan on Sunday, April 7. (Ramsey Cardy / Sportsfile via Getty Images)
There are only two sports in the world where athletes kick a ball off the grass and send it high through uprights. And the width of the posts in Gaelic football is only about three feet wider than NFL and college football goal posts.
“Kicking the ball is part of our DNA growing up here in Ireland,” Leader said. “Americans throw baseballs, basketballs, footballs. We don’t do that. We pass those balls with our feet, so now we’ve just been given a new ball to use our feet with …
“It’s the most perfect of synergies, just no one’s ever connected the dots.”
Full Article Below:
Why Gaelic footballers have the NFL's attention: 'These lads can kick balls'
Changes in the NFL kicking game could lead to opportunities for stars of Ireland's most popular sport.
theathletic.com
