Noland Smith
American football player
Noland "Super Gnat" Smith (born October 20, 1943) is an American former professional football player who was a wide receiver and return specialist for the Kansas City Chiefs (1967–1969) in the American Football League (AFL) and San Francisco 49ers (1969) in the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Tennessee A&I Tigers (now Tennessee State).
College career
Smith played college football at Tennessee A&I University (now Tennessee State University), where he set numerous school records for punt returns. He holds the school records for career punt returns (100); punt return yardage in a game (243), and season (572); career punt return yardage (1,933); highest average per punt return for a season (19.0) and a career (19.3); and most punt return touchdowns during a season (4) and a career (9).
Professional career
Known as "Super Gnat" for his short stature and light weight—he was listed at 5-6 1/4 and 154 pounds—he was the smallest-sized player in the AFL or NFL of his era. Smith was selected by the Kansas City Chiefs in the sixth round of the 1967 NFL/AFL draft. In his rookie season with the Chiefs in 1967, Smith led the American Football League in kickoff return yardage with 1,360 yards. On December 17, 1967, Smith returned a kickoff 106 yards for a touchdown, which held the record for longest kickoff return in Kansas City Chiefs history for 49 years until Knile Davis broke it on January 9, 2016. Smith currently ranks 18th on the NFL's all-time kick return average list with 26.06 yards per return.
During his three seasons in the AFL and the NFL with the Chiefs and 49ers, Smith was almost exclusively on kickoff and punt returns, with 63 punt returns for 635 yards and one touchdown and 82 kickoff returns for 2,137 yards and one touchdown, but only three rushing attempts for six yards, two pass receptions for 57 yards.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Noland Smith” as american football player. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american football player. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7048235. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1967, 1969 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Noland Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.