It’d be pretty hard—as in, essentially impossible—to find more significant, varied experiences than Mitch McCarthy shoehorned into eight or nine days which culminated in his first visit to Hamilton Stadium Sunday night.
“It’s been a busy week but I’m very, very happy,” said the imposing 6-foot-5, 233-pound punter from Melbourne, Australia, who’s engaged in a two-way hoof-off with fellow Aussie Nick Harberer to replace Nik Constantinou, who has departed for the NFL.
“I’ve never been in Canada before and I’m just so privileged to be here.”
McCarthy was the Ticats’ second-round choice in the 2026 Global Draft after an improbable U.S. college career that included three years at the University of Central Florida then a stunning senior season at Indiana, which went on to win its first-ever national title, and its first Big Ten crown since World War II, and became the first NCAA team to go a perfect 16-0 since Yale, 132 years ago.
He arrived at the Ticats’ McMaster training complex late last week, missing rookie camp and the opening of regular camp because of a couple of major prior commitments; he had a tryout at the NFL’s New England Patriots rookie mini-camp then last Monday headed to Washington D.C., where his national champion Hoosiers were hosted by Donald Trump on the White House South Lawn.
“Any time you get to go to the White House it’s an amazing experience, especially as an Aussie,” McCarthy told Ticats.ca, “That’s never been on my Bingo card and it’s popped out of nowhere in the last 12 months, just like a lot of other things.”
Including the national championship, which Indiana won over Miami Hurricanes 27-21, to cement one of the greatest two-year reversals in American college history. In 2024, they struggled to go 3-9 but after hiring head coach Curt Cignetti, went 11-2 overall the next year (with former Burlington Stampeder Kurtis Rourke at quarterback), then won it all in unprecedented fashion just four months ago.
“I got here a week ago and I haven’t really been able to see much because we’re in the dorm and going through camp,” McCarthy said. “I can’t wait to get out and about and explore the city a bit.”
Although he’d never even seen a CFL game on TV until six months ago, McCarthy has heavily researched the league and the city, both on his own and from “my best mate in America, Rob Camporese, who lived in a house with some of us football players and we became very close. He grew up around here and his dad is from Hamilton, so he was telling me about the culture in this city and it got me all pumped up, so it’s nice to have a tie here.”
At Indiana, McCarthy became the third Australian in the past four years to be the main punter on the national championship winners. But by then, he’d already had a lot of life experience in other fields; he’d been a basketball prospect, playing a year in 2016 at a California high school and being recruited by several Division-1 schools before returning Down Under and switching to Aussie Rules Football, where he was selected by Collingwood seventh overall in the 2016 draft. Like so many Aussie-Rulers, he contacted ProKick Australia, which sends Australians to NCAA and pro ball. He saw his friend Tony Taylor, now a Chicago Bear, follow that path to Iowa, and decided to pursue the same career path.
Outside of sport, he’d also been a courier for a plumbing company and a disability-support worker, so he had real-life work exposure when he accepted a scholarship to UCF in 2022. Three years later he joined Cignetti’s emerging juggernaut in Indiana.
He couldn’t have picked a better time and place.
“Yeah, I know,” he acknowledges. “In my third year at UCF, our coach got fired and I was looking for a new start somewhere and Indiana had an opening. Obviously, I saw what Cignetti did the year before when they went 11-1 in the regular season and he ran a pretty tight ship in there. So I got some feedback from other players and I just had a good feeling when I met with Cig. He told me about the program, I moved in and before I knew it we were 16-0 and won the championship.”
The Hoosiers were a team which scored so often, there weren’t as many punting opportunities as there might have been elsewhere. In fact when they didn’t punt in their rout of Michigan State in October, it was the first time Indiana hadn’t had to punt in a Big Ten game since 1989.
“What a stat,” he said after Sunday night’s 75-minute intrasquad game. “I’d never heard that one before. That’s usually a good thing to be a part of, it’s usually a good sign.”
The modern punting game, on both sides of the border, has evolved into a lot of angle-kicking, meaning pinning the plethora of great runback artists to one sideline or the other so he has only one main route of escape. The target is the area from the large yard-line numbers to the sidelines, with the intent to keep the ball just in bounds or to have it bounce before it leaves the field of play. If a punt goes out anywhere from 15 yards beyond the opposition’s goal line, though, it’s a penalty.
In the U.S., the punting objective is to have the ball hit inside the 20-yard line and in his 50 career college games at UCF and Indiana, 34 of his kicks—18 percent—met that objective.
And he did it against some historic programs: for Indiana he had two inside the 20 against Oregon and two against Miami in the title game, one of which eventually led to the Hoosiers blocking a punt deep, for a touchdown. He also pinned returners in against Alabama, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia Tech, Texas Tech, Cincinnati, SMU, Navy and East Carolina and landed three punts against Ohio State inside the 15-yard line. At UCF, his pinned-in victims included Florida, Colorado, Iowa State, BYU, Arizona and Utah.
“That’s one thing us Aussies pride ourselves on—directional kicking—especially the end-over-ends,” he says. “Any time you can get on the field within the 50 and you can pin someone, it’s an opportunity to hold their offence and give your offence a chance to score.”
Haberer, the other Aussie in the Cats’ punting competition, is also big (6-5, 220), long-legged and has shown some great directional kicking at camp.
