It’s not often someone goes from Poland to Alabama. While there’s been a specialist pipeline from Australia to the United State, Eastern Europe’s a bit more of an untapped market. But former Alabama kicker Adam Griffith didn’t come to the states initially in search of glory on the gridiron.
Adam Griffith might have the 2017 NFL draft’s most interesting story
The Bama man from Poland bounced back from one of the biggest plays in college football history.
Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images
Griffith was placed in an orphanage in Poland as a young boy. He was adopted by a couple from Georgia and ended up going to Alabama and becoming a kicker there. For a feature on College GameDay, Griffith returned to Poland with an ESPN crew and his adopted parents. They toured his orphanage, and he reunited with his birth parents all on camera.
It was an awesome moment for Griffith and viewers, but his entire career hasn’t been awesome.
His most infamous moment came on one of his first college field goal attempts.
Griffith is involved in one of the biggest missed field goals in football history, the Kick Six. It was his toe that met leather in 2013, sending the ball into the hands of Auburn’s Chris Davis. The play that nearly sent Bama to another SEC Championship instead broke the Tide’s national title streak.
You can see him getting up off the turf after being de-cleated by an Auburn blocker as Davis runs to score.
Griffith had been brought off the bench in relief. He had only kicked three field goals all season, but a lackluster kicking effort by Cade Foster (0-3 on the day) forced Nick Saban to make a change with the game on the line and one second left on the clock.
“Personally, I didn’t kick that kick very well,” Griffith said. “It wasn’t a good kick. I got under it. It was my first kick in the whole game, so it was a little different. But I don’t care what people say or think about me.”
He struggled in 2014 and early in 2015, but then turned things around.
Griffith missed his first four field goals that season, and he described dealing with some boo birds at Bryant-Denny Stadium.
But he righted the ship and missed only four for the rest of the season. He hit a 55-yarder against LSU and went 5 for 5 against Auburn, including being solely responsible for the Tide’s 12 halftime points.
And in the National Championship, Griffith had his biggest moment on the football field with an onside kick that swung the game the Tide would eventually win.
He could have left after 2015 but returned to become the Tide’s career leader in PATs in 2016. He improved his field goals average every year, up to a respectable 75 percent in 2016. CBS ranks him the 2017 NFL draft’s No. 5 kicker prospect.
And now an NFL shot awaits for the orphan boy from Poland who also happens to be a national champion.
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