Green Bay didn’t head into April expecting to come out with a kicker, but that’s exactly where the Packers landed after taking Trey Smack in the sixth round of the 2026 draft.
General manager Brian Gutekunst said in a one-on-one interview with Cheesehead TV that the team had not mapped out a kicker pick going into the draft. Still, once Smack remained on the board, Green Bay decided to move. The Packers gave up two seventh-round picks to get him, then moved on from veteran Brandon McManus - after already paying McManus a $1 million roster bonus for 2026 - and later Lucas Havrisik, who had set the franchise record for the made longest field goal as an injury replacement for McManus in 2025.
Gutekunst said he viewed Smack as the kind of kicker who normally comes off the board much earlier, pointing to a range he believes would have fit around the bottom of the fourth round or the start of the fifth. He also noted that, since 2017, only 7 of the 21 kickers drafted have gone by the middle of the fifth round or earlier, which puts Smack among the more highly regarded kickers to come through the draft in recent years.
Even with Green Bay’s limited draft capital, Gutekunst said the board broke in a way that made the move possible. “The way the board was, he was sticking out to us. It was like, ‘Okay, let’s take a shot here,’ because we believed in the player and the guy.”
Special teams coordinator Cam Achord was on board as well, according to Gutekunst. The Packers had considered two other options, but the timing pushed them toward Smack.
“He fell a little bit further than we expected,” Gutekunst said. “At the time, we had two guys that we felt good about taking and we were many picks away.
I don’t feel like either guy would be there by the time we got there,” was his explaination on why Green Bay moved up.
The draft board around Smack backed up that urgency. The Chicago Bears took defensive lineman Jordan van den Berg, who had visited Green Bay before the draft, just three picks before Smack went off the board. After Smack’s selection, the Dallas Cowboys grabbed receiver Anthony Smith two picks later, and both offensive lineman Ethan Onianwa and quarterback Behren Morton were taken before what would have been the Packers’ first seventh-round pick.
Smith, Onianwa and Morton had all visited Green Bay before the draft, and those are the kinds of players the Packers usually have a better chance of landing when the board starts to thin out.
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