Paddy McAteer’s entire job is kicking the ball off and getting out of the way, and on Saturday he hit the longest field goal in Indiana history to keep the Hoosiers’ national title defense alive, a kick everyone outside Bloomington will have forgotten by December.
Indiana is the reigning national champion, the team that went 16-0 last year and beat Miami in the CFP title game, and the current version is 8-1 and ranked fourth. That record also means Saturday was the second straight week the Hoosiers needed overtime just to get out of a Big Ten building with a win. Indiana’s whole run from preseason afterthought to defending champ is still the headline of this era, but Saturday made that headline look a lot more fragile than it reads.
McAteer is not who you’d pencil in for that moment. He’s Indiana’s kickoff specialist, the guy who jogs on, boots it to the back of the end zone, and jogs right back off. Nico Radicic is the actual placekicker, and Radicic had already missed a 31-yard attempt and watched another get blocked before Curt Cignetti decided the final kick of regulation needed a leg that could reach 60 yards, a distance outside Radicic’s range.
The kick itself was absurd on its own terms.
It was McAteer’s fourth field goal attempt of the entire season; he’d made exactly one of his first three, from 21 yards. He had never made a kick that long anywhere, including practice. “We never really touched 60,” he said afterward. “It was a forbidden number.”
Then things got stranger.
Minnesota kicker Luke Drzewiecki had drilled his own 60-yard field goal nineteen seconds earlier to put the Gophers up 16-13, which meant Indiana needed a 60-yard answer just to survive Minnesota’s. Throw in that this is a season defined by the Big Ten being the sport’s actual dynasty right now, and a single Saturday producing two field goals that long, from opposing kickers, in the final two minutes, is something the conference reportedly hadn’t seen since 1899.
https://twitter.com/CBSSportsCFB/status/2116669557020766655
Grant Wilson, in after Josh Hoover was pulled following a hard hit at halftime, found Charlie Becker for a 25-yard touchdown on the first play of overtime, and Tobi Osunsanmi ended it with a fourth-down sack. Final: Indiana 23, Minnesota 16.
Give Cignetti’s team this much, it keeps finding ways to survive without style points. But a defending champion needing a specialist’s longest kick of his life just to force overtime, for the second straight week, isn’t a plan. It’s a streak, and streaks like that don’t last the rest of November.
McAteer played Gaelic football growing up in Mullaghbawn, Ireland, and didn’t touch an American football until 2024. Two years later, a guy who learned this sport in his twenties hit a kick longer than some NFL kickers make on a good day. Nobody brings him up again until he misses one.
