By comparison, the league-wide success rate for field goals in 2004 was over 80 percent. In 1983, when O'Donoghue was in his “prime,” it was 72%. How the hell did this guy manage to stay employed for nearly a decade when the average NFL career lasts only three years?
Before you contemplate that question, though, consider the fact that Neil O’Donoghue was not only a painfully inaccurate field goal kicker, but also that he had a true knack for failing in the clutch, in the most miserable ways imaginable.
Take the October, 24, 1983 Monday night game against the Giants, in which O’Donoghue missed three overtime kicks in an eventual 20-20 tie. Shockingly, one of those misses was a 19-yarder, meaning that the line of scrimmage was the two-yard line. So this guy missed a field goal the equivalent length of an extra point in overtime, and his teammates had to go back out there, hoping to get into field goal range again. “That’s okay, Neil. Shake it off. We’ll give you another shot.” Little did they know that, no matter how short the distance, Neil O’ would have missed that night.
And the list goes on. In 1984, he blew a game to the Packers with a missed extra point and a 45-yard field goal that was short. On the last game of that same '84 season, needing a win against Washington to make the playoffs, O'Donoghue missed the game-winning field goal as time expired. It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that O'Donoghue would be just as ineffective in the clutch as he is on the first drive of the game. Why would a kicker with a career percentage under 60% suddenly become a go-to guy with the game on the line?
O'Donoghue did earn a measure of redemption in 1984, however, when he scored 117 points on the season, according to the miraculous website www.kicking.com – miraculous because it really exists. That was a Cardinals team record – for all position players, mind you, not just kickers – that stood until just last season (2005) when Neil Rackers racked up 140 points on 40 field goals – the latter a new league record. Apparently the Cardinals’ knack for getting the ball in the end zone extends to the current day.
Luck o’ the Irish
Born in Ireland in 1953, O'Donoghue was a standout hurling and rugby player before attending Auburn University in Alabama as their field goal kicker. He was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in 1977, and connected on two of six attempts before being cut after five games. Ironically, O'Donoghue had held out for the start of that season until mid-September, hoping to extract a bigger contract out of the Bills. After nearly avoiding deportation back to Ireland due to immigration problems in 1978, O'Donoghue was signed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a 1976 expansion franchise that had posted a sympathy-inducing 2-26 record in their first two years of existence.
Amazingly, the bumbling Bucs went 15-17 during the two years that O'Donoghue was their kicker, as he connected on 57 percent of his attempts – albeit with a staggering nine missed extra points. It wasn’t all rainbows and four-leaf clovers for the Irishman, though. In 1978, the team’s center snapped the pigskin over the holder’s head and O'Donoghue tried to kick the ball out of bounds, but whiffed on it. This led to an 80-yard return by the opposing Minnesota Vikings, and later resulted in Bucs’ coach John McKay referring to O’Donoghue as “The Irish Wonder.”
The next year with Tampa, O'Donoghue had four kicks blocked by the Vikings in a single game, including a last-second PAT attempt that would have sent the game into overtime. We should all be willing to give Neil a pass on those four misses, and lay them instead at the feet of his offensive line. Maybe it was their way of getting back at him for the gaffe the previous year.
This long, nearly unbroken run of mediocrity brings us back to our original question: how did O'Donoghue keep getting re-signed? You’d have to think that management could have auditioned someone, anyone, who could kick better than 59%, couldn’t they? You’d think that a local university or junior college kicker could walk on and make a 19-yard field goal, right? A friggin’ extra point!
I believe that the secret to O'Donoghue’s longevity lies in the makeup of the employer where he enjoyed his longest reign of infamy – the St. Louis Cardinals.
Historically, the Cardinals franchise has always been one of the worst teams in NFL history. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. In fact, the Cardinals franchise is the oldest continuously active franchise in professional football, having originated in Chicago in 1920 as one of the league’s charter members. What they lacked in success, they compensated for in endurance.
During the Cardinals franchise’s entire 85-year existence, their aggregate record is 448-638-38, for an underwhelming .399 winning percentage. Just to give them the benefit of the doubt, I didn’t even include their 0-10 record in 1944, when they merged with Pittsburgh.
The Cardinals were nothing if not consistent. Although the Chicago Cardinals won NFL Championships in 1925 and 1947 (the Super Bowl was not initiated until 1965), the Cardinals have only appeared in the playoffs since 1947 four times, including a 1948 NFL hampionship loss, and in 1998, when they squeaked into the playoffs with a 9-7 record.
Longevity Explained
So what’s all this got to do with Neil O'Donoghue? Well, my theory is that during the team’s three-generations-long reign of football ineptitude, one recurring theme appears. The entire Cardinals organization, top to bottom, was rotten. From the owner, down through the front office, the coaching staff, the scouts, the trainers and the players – everyone has been terrible; kickers included. And if the entire organization suffers from the loser’s disease, there’s no reason that the talent evaluators should be immune. So they kept bringing O'Donoghue back. He was just as bad as the rest of his teammates, and therefore didn’t stand out. Just because he was a kicker, it shouldn’t over–ride his inherent Cardinal-ness, right?
Of the 13 NFL Hall of Famers who played for the Cardinals (not counting Jim Thorpe, who played all of one game for the team), six were either coaches or players who gained their reputation while playing for other franchises; only two Hall of Famers played for the Cards as recently as 1975.
Name one great Cardinals player, I dare you. Hall of Famer Dick “Night Train” Lane? He played most of his career with the Rams. Jim Hart? Please…. Dan Dierdorf? His annoying announcing career is his long-lasting legacy. Shortstop Ozzie Smith is the closest you’re going to get, but he plays the wrong sport. Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald displayed true brilliance in the 2005 season, but give them a couple years and they’ll either be pulled back down to earth by the rest of the organization or traded.
I’m suggesting that the football Cardinals management, including its executive team, was entirely aware of the jaw-dropping ineptitude of O'Donoghue and others like him, but were completely powerless to do anything about it. They probably figured that, in the grand scheme of things, the kicker position wasn’t that important, and that as long as he was hitting over 50 percent, he was not that awful. Hell, he had a far higher kicking percentage than the winning percentage of the team during that era. And that explains the long, anxiety-inducing kicking career of the Irish Wonder. He’s probably resting his inaccurate kicking foot now somewhere on the coast of County Kerry, cashing his NFL pension check each month and laughing all the way to the bank.
