Umpire Larry Smith Carted Off After Slipping on Wet Wembley Field in Texans-Jaguars Game

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2026

The cart is the one sight in football that stops everything, and at Wembley Stadium on Sunday it came out in the first quarter for somebody nobody had circled on a scouting report. Umpire Larry Smith, working the middle of the field in the Texans-Jaguars game, slipped on the wet grass between plays, fell backward, climbed back to his feet — and then went straight back down. Trainers from both teams rushed in, the way they do for a quarterback or a cornerback, and after several minutes on the turf Smith was helped onto a cart he clearly did not want to need. He could not put any weight on his left leg, according to the New York Post. The game was still scoreless, with about 10 minutes left in the first quarter. It finished 34-31 to Houston, and almost none of that is what the people in that stadium will describe first when they get home.

Walk through the sequence, because the sequence is what made it hard to watch. Smith was doing the invisible part of his job — moving to change out the ball after a play, by Fox News' account — when his footing simply went. USA Today described him slipping, stumbling backward and falling on the wet surface, getting up, taking a couple of steps and falling again, in clear pain. There was no collision, no player anywhere near him. That is the cruel physics of a non-contact injury: the field itself does it. Football people have a phrase for a knee or a leg that gives way with nobody touching you, and the phrase is never a comforting one. Nobody official has used any phrase at all yet about Smith — more on that below — and it is worth being careful not to diagnose a man from a television replay. What is known is simple and plenty: he fell, he tried, he couldn't, and he left on a cart.

On weekdays, he's a middle school principal

Here is the detail that turned a scary moment into a human one. As Smith was being treated, NFL Network's Mike Garafolo posted the line that ricocheted around the sport, writing on X: "Umpire Larry Smith went down and was carted off. Smith is in his second year as an NFL official while serving as principal of a middle school in Kansas," Garafolo wrote. Sit with that for a second. Somewhere in Kansas City, Kansas, there is a school full of middle schoolers whose principal spends his Sundays standing in the middle of NFL pass rushes — and on this Sunday, those kids could watch him get carried off a field in London on international television. NFL officials are part-timers by design; the league's stripes have day jobs all over the country. But there is something about principal that lands differently. The man who runs morning announcements and hallway duty also holds the most exposed job in officiating, spotting the ball and policing the interior line with 300-pound professionals colliding a few feet from his face.

His route to that spot was the long one. Smith was a longtime college official in the Big Ten before the NFL called him up in 2025, the Post reported, and Pro Football Talk noted he also worked in the USFL on the way. USA Today put Sunday in a number that deserves underlining: this was the 22nd NFL game of his career. Twenty-two. He is not a lifer coasting on reputation; he is a second-year official still early in the climb, working a marquee international assignment — the kind of game the league gives officials it is bringing along. That is what was lying on the Wembley turf: not an anonymous stripe, but a guy in year two of a dream he had chased through college stadiums and a spring league, with a school waiting for him back home.

His crew closed ranks around him

The response on the field said plenty about the fraternity he belongs to. Trainers from both the Texans' and Jaguars' staffs attended to him — when a man is down, the colors on the polo stop mattering — and Fox News reported that line judge Carl Johnson came over, took a knee, removed his cap and appeared to pray while his colleague was being treated. Players do that for each other every week and we call it brotherhood. Officials do it once and it stops a stadium cold, because it reminds everyone that the people we spend all week arguing about are, in fact, people. And as the cart finally pulled away, Smith tipped his cap to the Wembley crowd, per the Florida Times-Union's game account — a small, stubbornly classy gesture from a man being driven out of his own game. The crowd, by multiple accounts, applauded him off.

How a crew works a man down

Then the game had to go on, and this is the part most fans never think about until it happens: what does a crew actually do when it loses a man? A standard NFL crew has seven officials, and the umpire might be the hardest to replace mid-game. He stations himself in the offensive backfield area, opposite the referee, and his world is the interior — holding and illegal blocks at the line, ineligible receivers, the legality of the scrum on running plays — while also spotting the ball and checking players' equipment. Remove him and you don't just lose a whistle; you lose the best set of eyes on the part of the field where the most unglamorous penalties live. The NFL plans for it anyway. The league has six-official mechanics — a rehearsed reshuffle of positions and responsibilities — for exactly this situation, Pro Football Talk noted, and referee Shawn Hochuli was expected to absorb much of the umpire's usual workload, the Post reported. Six men then worked the remaining three-plus quarters of a game that turned into a 65-point shootout, with one fewer angle on every snap. Whatever anyone thought of the flags the rest of the day, that context is worth carrying: the crew grading out this film on Tuesday will do it knowing they finished the job shorthanded, in the rain, an ocean from home.

A field that was grabbing everybody

Smith was the worst case, not the only case. Early rain had made the Wembley grass slippery for everyone, the Associated Press reported — according to the AP's game story, Smith "slipped and hurt his knee in the first quarter" and left on a cart, in the same breath as players fighting their footing. Houston receiver Nico Collins changed into longer cleats during the first half, and Texans tight end Dalton Schultz slipped just short of a first-down marker after a red-zone catch. Players get to swap spikes and adjust. Officials run the same grass in their own footwear, constantly backpedaling and changing direction to keep plays in front of them, and nobody thinks about their footing until it fails. Sunday it failed a man in the most public way possible.

The game itself, it should be said, became a classic. Houston led 17-14 at halftime on two C.J. Stroud touchdown passes to Foster Moreau, and the Texans eventually won a 34-31 thriller on Ka'imi Fairbairn's late kick — the full story, Stroud's 312 yards and all, is in our recap of the Wembley shootout. Smith's crew, a man short, worked every snap of it.

What we don't know yet

Now the honest part. As of publication, no diagnosis and no update on Larry Smith's condition had been announced — not by the league, not by the teams, not by anyone in a position to know. Reports have described an apparent leg injury; the AP said he hurt his knee; Fox News relayed an NFL Network description of a lower-leg injury. Anyone claiming more specificity than that right now is guessing, and a man's health is a bad thing to guess about. What Monday morning looks like in Kansas City, Kansas — whether the principal is at the school doors, on crutches, in a boot, or telling a building full of kids the story himself — nobody has said, and this story will be updated when somebody does. Until then, the only responsible sentence is the simplest one: here's hoping the second year of Larry Smith's NFL career has a lot more chapters than the 22 games it took to reach Wembley, and that game 23 comes sooner than the look on his face suggested. For the rest of Sunday's NFL fallout, keep it with Previously's sports coverage.