Mack Brown is getting the kicks he needs from an Irish rugby player.

Inside Carolina’s Pat James has a great long-form story out on UNC sophomore punter Ben Kiernan. The piece is, well, very long — and tells you everything you could ever want to know about Kiernan.

Like everyone else who gobbled up the rebirth of Carolina football in Brown’s return last season, I saw Kiernan as a true freshman average 43 yards on 60 punts, 20 landing inside the 20-yard line.

But what I noticed about Kiernan’s first game as a sophomore against Syracuse was not only that his kicks were as long as last year, some had a tighter spiral than Sam Howell was throwing that day.

Kiernan grew up in Dublin on rugby and had never seen a game of American football, much less played one. His parents moved their three sons and adopted daughter to Raleigh before Ben’s last year in middle school and he went out for the football team pretty much as a lark.

When the coach lined every player along the goal line and asked each one of them to kick the ball as far as he could, Ben not only became the team’s punter and placekicker, he soon had a new dream, to kick for UNC when the Tar Heels started recruiting him.

At 6-foot, 200 pounds with a leg that kicked a thousand rugby balls over the years, Ben’s high school coaches told him that if he worked hard, he might even get a football scholarship to college.

Kiernan went to a Charlotte kicking camp of former Tar Heel Dan Orner, whose famous field goal on the last play of the game in 2002 stunned Duke in Durham. Then one day, Kiernan got the call from Mack offering him a scholarship.

Orner knew what it took to be a college punter, and even last spring when the pandemic suspended school and most travel, he helped Kiernan train via Zoom to improve on his freshman season.

Brown was upset with his overall special teams last year and fired the position coach. He hired one from Nebraska, whom Kiernan knew since being recruited there. Now, the Kiernans plan to stay in Raleigh and, hopefully, watch Ben kick his way to college stardom and into the NFL, where he would be only the second Irish rugger.

 

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