Andre Szmyt’s 56-yard winner against the Steelers did more than decide a Thursday night game. It put a national spotlight on something the Browns have been seeing for months: they’ve got a kicker who belongs in the top tier.
With the wind making life miserable all night, Szmyt handled the biggest kick of the game and then some. He drilled all three extra points, knocked through field goals from 44 and 56 yards in the fourth quarter, and sent the final one through with the kind of confidence Cleveland now seems to expect. Pittsburgh’s Chris Boswell, meanwhile, missed a 48-yarder when the right-to-left wind pushed it just outside the left upright.
That finish only added to a stretch that has turned Szmyt from a shaky early NFL story into one of the league’s most reliable legs. His career started rough, but since finding his footing, he’s been nails.
The 56-yarder was a career best in the NFL, topping the 55-yard walk-off he hit against the Green Bay Packers in Week 3 of the 2025 season. He also connected from 53 yards twice as a rookie, though he did miss from 56 against the Detroit Lions in Week 4 that year, a kick that had the distance but drifted just outside left.
This season, he’d already shown the range before Thursday night. Eleven days earlier against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he hit from 50 yards in the first quarter from the right hash, and the ball finished just left of center. He also made a 50-yarder from the left hash in the 2026 preseason, though that doesn’t count on his official record.
And if you want to go beyond the NFL ledger, Szmyt has already shown this kind of range before. He spent the first half of the 2024 calendar year with the UFL’s St.
Louis Battlehawks after a brief 2023 offseason stint with the Chicago Bears as an undrafted free agent out of Syracuse. With the Battlehawks, he led the UFL in field goals that season, going 19-of-21 and drilling a 61-yard kick that barely cleared the crossbar in a crosswind.
He also hit from 54 yards in his final season at Syracuse.
The bigger story is how far he’s come over the last year. Szmyt’s NFL debut was ugly: a missed extra point and a missed 36-yarder in a 17-16 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, the kind of start that put immediate pressure on his job. Through eight games, he was just 10-of-13 on field goals and 12-of-13 on extra points, and his -3.1 score in kick value added ranked among the worst in the league at that point.
Since then, he’s flipped the script completely. Over his last stretch, he’s gone 22-of-22 on field goals and 20-of-20 on PATs. Only Will Reichard, Evan McPherson, and Ka’imi Fairbairn have posted better numbers in kick value added during that span than Szmyt’s 10.34.
The makes are one thing. The placement is another.
Szmyt hasn’t just been converting; he’s been splitting the uprights with precision. In the last 11 months, he ranks No. 3 in accuracy quotient at 91, trailing only Dominic Zvada and Spencer Shrader, both at 93 on smaller sample sizes.
By that measure, there’s a real case that Cleveland has the league’s most accurate kicker over that stretch.
Even the distance profile works in his favor. His average attempt has been 39.8 yards, which ranks 18th in the NFL, but the longer the kick gets, the less erratic he seems to become. Across his career, the horizontal charting shows a kicker who stays steady under pressure and, for whatever reason, tends to miss left from the middle of the field.
That’s the profile Szmyt is building now: leg strength, accuracy, composure, and enough clutch moments to get the whole league’s attention. The Steelers game was just the latest proof.
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