NFL kickers are getting so good, they’re changing the game.
In Week One, across the NFL, kickers went a cumulative 21-for-23 on field goals of 50 yards or longer. That’s an absurd success rate of 91.3 percent, and it changes the way coaches strategize about what it means to be in field goal range.
It used to be that coaches would only try a 50-yard field goal in desperation mode at the end of a game. Now every coach considers his team to be in field goal range once a field goal would only be 50 yards, and if you’re a kicker who can’t be trusted from 50 yards, you won’t have a job for long.
One of the two kickers who missed from the 50-plus range in Week One, Washington’s Cade York, got cut the next day. The other kicker who missed from 50-plus was Baltimore’s Justin Tucker, who isn’t in danger of getting cut because for many years he was the best kicker in the NFL, although he’s now, at age 34, one of the oldest kickers in the NFL and no longer the best.
Every other kicker was perfect from 50 yards and beyond. That includes Pittsburgh’s Chris Boswell and Houston’s Ka’imi Fairbairn, both of whom went 3-for-3, and San Francisco’s Jake Moody, New Orleans’ Blake Grupe and Dallas’s Brandon Aubrey, who all went 2-for-2. Aubrey also kicked one through the uprights from 66 yards, which would have tied Tucker’s NFL record, but it was called back on a penalty and Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy declined to give Aubrey a chance to make one from 71 yards.
But it’s probably just a matter of time before there’s a kicker whose coach believes in him from 70 yards, and 60 yards is solidly within field goal range. NFL kickers just keep getting better.