good for the kicker. NFL typically doesn’t value kickers. Which is odd because they have enormous impact on NFL games that are typically very close and won by the skin of your teeth. NFL isn’t like college where it’s blowout city most weeks. Those games are very competitive. Usually.
Yeah, but it's because they're plentiful and easy to replace.
Detroit's kicker was selling concrete or something 13 weeks ago. He had a massive game a few weeks back where he hit two important FGs from 50+.
KC's kicker went 4-5 yesterday including kicking the late go-ahead field goal, and the miss was excusable because it was from 59. He's the injury replacement for Butker, after being the injury replacement for Moody in SF a few weeks back.
Kickers generally have fairly long careers, there are only 32 teams and each one usually only rosters one kicker, and statistically out of 130 FBS teams you're going to be graduating a starting kicker on ~25% of teams every year, so you've got ~32 new job applicants for almost zero openings each year.
So it makes perfect sense. Just about any amount of money a kicker can make in NIL is better than taking their chance in the NFL draft. Looking at
NFL draft history, the most recent year I've seen more than 3 kickers drafted was 2012, and before that was 1993...
