'All right, who's Trey Smack?': How Matt Stover di...

GREEN BAY, Wis. -- If it wasn't for a club lacrosse team in Maryland, a little encouragement from the son of a former NFL kicker and a pandemic, who knows where Trey Smack would be today? But it wouldn't be with the Green Bay Packers, that's for sure. Smack, who was the only kicker picked in this year's NFL draft, needed all three of those things to happen to even nudge him toward football. The sixth-round pick (No. 216 overall) from Florida didn't even consider the sport until he was a sophomore at Severna Park (Maryland) High School. At the time, he played soccer and lacrosse. One of his teammates at the Maryland Crabs Lacrosse Club was Joe Stover, the son of former NFL kicker Matt Stover. "One day after a Crabs practice, they were farting around with this football and Joe came home and said, 'Dad, you wouldn't believe how Trey Smack kicks a football,'" Stover told ESPN in a phone interview the day after the Packers concluded their rookie minicamp in early May. &#8226 How rare infection threatened DaVon's career &#8226 Aaron Rodgers is back! Steelers have QB issue &#8226 32 NFL schedules, bold predictions &#8226 Can Rams, Stafford repeat 2025 success? &#8226 Chiefs back on biggest stage in 2026 "I'm going, 'All right, who's Trey Smack?'" Once Stover realized that his son was talking about one of his lacrosse teammates, he agreed to take a look. When kickers ask to be evaluated by Stover, he gives them two options: kick once and he will give you immediate feedback, or kick several and he will wait until the end. "He's got a little cockiness to him," Stover said. "So he said, 'One ball.'" Without so much as a stretch or a warmup, Smack kicked it. Stover immediately called over to Smack's mom, who was watching from afar. "I said, 'Hey, Libby, come here," Stover said. "And she went, 'What?' I said, 'He's done with lacrosse. He has a pro leg at [age] 16, and nobody's taught him how to do that. He just has the talent.' And that's what Trey had. And I can tell you I did the same thing for [former NFL kickers] Phil Dawson and Mason Crosby." Packers sixth-round draft pick Trey Smack at the 2026 NFL combine in Indianapolis. Kirby Lee-Imagn ImagesIt was about that time when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. "They locked up all the lacrosse goals in Maryland, and so I was like, 'Well, they can't take down the field goal posts,'" Smack said. "So, I started kicking, started doing my thing, and somehow I went to a camp nine months down the line and got ranked 13th in the nation." Less than a year later, he jumped up to No. 1 in the high school kicker rankings. "I was like, 'OK, maybe I should do this,'" Smack said. Stover, a former Pro Bowler with the Ravens and a two-time Super Bowl champion (SB XXV, Giants; SB XXXV, Ravens), agreed to train Smack. "He humbled me a lot, no doubt," Smack said. "He's like, 'You need to do this right.'" That meant not accepting that any kick that went through the uprights was a good kick. "Let's say you hit a golf shot, and you thin it, but somehow it gets on the green," Smack said. "It's kind of like that. It didn't look pretty, but it got there." "There was a flaw in Trey's form that I told him if he didn't manage it, it's going to cause him a lot of problems," Stover said. "It's a power move, and you have a lot of power, but you can lose accuracy. And so he listened deeply on it, and he no longer does that." After a successful high school career, Smack went on to convert 53 of 64 field goal attempts during his college career at Florida and all but one of his 101 extra point attempts. The Packers have been on a kicker merry-go-round with different guys jumping on and off since Crosby's last season in 2022. They haven't had the same kicker for two full consecutive seasons since then. They tried rookie Anders Carlson, who like Smack was a sixth-round pick in 2023. After one season and a key missed field goal late in a playoff loss to the 49ers, they moved on and tried out several kickers the following offseason before settling on Brayden Narveson, who lasted six games into the 2024 season before they signed veteran Brandon McManus. After a near-perfect second half of the 2024 season, the Packers thought they had settled on McManus. They signed him to a three-year, $15.3 million contract last offseason. However, McManus battled injuries and ended last season by missing three kicks (two field goals and an extra point) in Green Bay's 31-27 playoff loss to the Bears. Meanwhile, the Packers kept Lucas Havrisik, who kicked in the three games last season that McManus missed. Still, they paid McManus the $1 million roster bonus that his contract called for in March, and the thought was Havrisik would be there for competition purposes only. That was until general manager Brian Gutekunst became sold on Smack, so much so that he released McManus last week. Gutekunst was asked after the draft how he evaluates kickers. He raised his hands over his head, mimicking the officials' sign

'All right, who's Trey Smack?': How Matt Stover di...

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