When Andre Szmyt sent a pressure-packed 56-yarder sailing through the uprights, successfully navigating both the heightened stakes of the moment and the crosswinds that had made kicking so difficult throughout the Thursday Night Football affair, national audiences got proof of what the Cleveland Browns have known for a while now.
Put simply: This team has a top-tier kicker.
Szmyt played the part of the hero yet again against the Pittsburgh Steelers, drilling all three of his extra points and converting from both 44 and 56 yards during the fourth quarter. His performance was further amplified by the struggles of his positional counterpart.
Chris Boswell, in the midst of an uncharacteristically poor season, failed to connect on a 48-yarder as the right-to-left wind took the ball just outside the left upright.
But this isn't anything new. Though Szmyt's NFL career started off in tough fashion, he's done nothing but excel since getting his bearings — a statement that rings true whether you're employing the eye test, using basic stats, or doing a (spoiler alert!) more advanced kicker analysis.
Andre Szmyt's 56-yarder was more of a wheelhouse kick than his NFL career would have you think
ANDRE SZMYT FROM 56 YARDS FOR THE WIN! pic.twitter.com/64qGSekF7q
— NFL (@NFL) October 2, 2026
Teammate reactions can tell a compelling story, and the Cleveland Browns left no doubt how much faith they have in their kicker after he nailed the game-winner. They were quick to heap on the praise but, just as tellingly, didn't seem particularly surprised that he was able to set a new career high with the pressure heaped on in full.
Before he beat the AFC North rival Steelers from 56 yards, Szmyt's career long had come from one yard shorter: a walk-off game-winner against the Green Bay Packers in Week 3 of the 2025 season. He also connected from 53 twice during his rookie campaign, though he had a 56-yard misfire against the Detroit Lions in Week 4 that had the leg but not the accuracy, finishing just outside left.
So far in 2026, Szmyt has also hit from 50 yards against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 11 days prior to his career-best kick, lining up from the right hash in the first quarter and sending it through the uprights just left of center. (He also made a 50-yarder from the left hash in the 2026 preseason, though that right-down-the-pipes kick isn't technically part of his official resume.)
But 56 yards is only his high-water mark if you don't include his professional exploits with the UFL's St. Louis Battlehawks, with whom he spent the first half of the 2024 calendar year after a brief 2023 offseason dalliance with the Chicago Bears as an undrafted free agent out of Syracuse. Szmyt led the UFL in field goals that season, going 19-of-21 and connecting on a 61-yard bomb that, fighting a crosswind, barely made it over the crossbar. He also hit from 54 yards in his final year at Syracuse, so this latest heroic kick was more of a wheelhouse kick than those late to the Szmyt bandwagon may realize.
It was also the latest piece of evidence in a year-long trend.
Andre Szmyt has used the last calendar year to prove himself an elite kicker
Ask someone to name an elite kicker, and Andre Szmyt's name probably won't be the first name to escape their lips. Maybe they'll cite Brandon Aubrey. Cameron Dicker (not this season, so far!), Will Reichard, Cam Little, Evan McPherson, and a handful of other options could be on the tip of their tongue. But Szmyt is submitting quite the body of work to prove he belongs in the club even if he came out of the preseason at No. 16 in my personal rankings.
The 28-year-old got off to a rough start in the NFL — and understandably so on the heels of a tumultuous offseason as his mother unexpectedly died due to a brain aneurysm in July 2025. He faced immediate calls for his job after his debut featured a missed extra point and an unsuccessful 36-yarder that would've given Cleveland the lead with under three minutes to play in an eventual 17-16 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals.
Through eight games, he was 10-of-13 on field goals and 12-of-13 on extra points, leading to a putrid -3.1 score in my proprietary kick value added (KVA) metric, which looks not just at a kicker's makes and misses but also at the distances from which they kicked and the overall league's level of success from each area during the season in question. Only six kickers had performed worse at that point in the campaign.
Since then? Well, see for yourselves:
Szmyt has gone 22-of-22 on his field goals and 20-of-20 on his PATs. Only Reichard, McPherson, and Ka'imi Fairbairn (the 2025 leader in the metric) have outproduced his 10.34 KVA. And the plaudits needn't stop there because Szmyt hasn't just succeeded in the make-or-miss style of kicker analysis; his kicks are consistently sailing through the center of the uprights.
Because I chart every single kick — and it's worth noting that it is done manually, so there's some degree of human error in determining exactly where the ball crosses the threshold — I've been able to develop some accuracy metrics for more-detailed kicking analysis. Accuracy quotient (AQ), first introduced in my post-Week 3 preseason notebook, lives on a 0-100 scale and isolates a kicker's aim independent of leg strength, looking at how far left or right the ball crossed the threshold relative to the center of the uprights while also considering the tightness of the angular margin for error.
Over the same date range (Oct. 27, 2025 through Week 4's Thursday Night Football), Szmyt ranks No. 3 in AQ with a score of 91 that trails only the small samples of Dominic Zvada (93 AQ on six attempts) and Spencer Shrader (93 AQ on eight attempts). It's entirely reasonable to call the Cleveland specialist the league's most-accurate kicker over the last 11 months.
Though skeptics may point to a middling average attempt distance of 39.8 yards (No. 18 in the NFL) as a reason for success, they're more than welcome to look at the horizontal accuracy breakdown of all kicks in his career and see that, if anything, he gets less erratic on longer kicks (and, for some reason, always errs left from the middle of the field):
Increasingly, Szmyt has the all-around profile of an elite kicker. He's shown the leg strength to hit long-range attempts, doesn't sacrifice accuracy as the tries get more difficult, has showcased mental resiliency in multiple ways, enjoys passionate support from his locker room companions, and has the highlight-reel plays necessary to garner some national attention.
A game-winner against a division rival can go a long way. For Szmyt, it may prove confirmation of a not-so-new performance level that already has him brushing shoulders with the established positional elites.
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