For once, a player had Bill Belichick over a barrel. And the best coach in football, the one who notoriously eschews paying premium salaries to players, gave in. So in 2015, Belichick made Stephen Gostkowski—the New England Patriots’ kicker—the NFL’s highest-paid player at his position.
Belichick and Tom Brady represent the Patriots’ excellence, but Gostkowski who explains a less appreciated aspect of the franchise’s stability. While other teams suffer through a succession of kickers—often quickly replaced after an iconic miss—Gostkowski has held the job in New England virtually uninterrupted since 2006 and saved the Patriots from the nightmares that haunt other clubs.
Residents of Chicago understand this better than anyone else these days. They writhed in agony on Sunday night as Cody Parkey—in his first year with the Bears—had a kick tipped, ricochet off the upright, into the crossbar and fall for a miss. That sealed a devastating playoff loss to the Philadelphia Eagles.
There are two things that reliably happen during each NFL playoffs. One team wins the Super Bowl. And a botched kick usually ends the season of another abruptly. These infamous moments raise a question about these billion-dollar sports franchises: Do NFL teams undervalue kickers?
It isn’t just chance that kickers are back in the spotlight again. Field-goal percentage has steadily climbed over time, making misses even more glaring. And in a wild season in which a scoring explosion engulfed the league, NFL games were closer than ever: 73 games were decided by three points or fewer—the most in history.
So it was only natural that the players in charge of getting teams three points were placed under unusual scrutiny. It didn’t take long for that to happen.
In Week 2, the Browns were on the verge of snapping a losing streak that dated back to 2016 with an improbable win over the New Orleans Saints—until kicker Zane Gonzalez missed a total of four kicks, including two within the final two minutes, in a 21-18 loss. The same week, Vikings kicker Daniel Carlson missed three field goals. Both were released the following Monday, and Minnesota coach Mike Zimmer didn’t have much trouble explaining why.
“Did you see the game?” he said.
The Patriots have avoided these blunders with a strategy so basic it’s actually radical. They pay their kicker more than any other kicker in the sport. For a decade, they had Adam Vinatieri and they only let him go when they found somebody they liked better. And since 2006 they’ve had Gostkowski, who they pay more than any other kicker in the NFL to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere else. The only time the Patriots used their franchise tag in the last seven years was on Gostkowski.
Stephen Gostkowski was drafted by the Patriots in the fourth round of the 2006 NFL draft.
Photo:
John Sleezer/Zuma Press
But the Patriots are an extreme outlier. Since 1996, Vinatieri’s first season with them, only three people attempted at least one field goal as a Patriots kicker. (Gostkowski was injured for part of the 2010 season.) That’s not just the fewest of any NFL team. The average NFL team has gone through 11 kickers during that span. The Redskins have gone through a league-high 21.
“The mentality has been: We can save a buck with another kicker,” said Michael Lardon, a doctor and mental-performance coach who has worked with kickers. “That’s been the culture in the NFL for a long time.”
The cost for the Patriots to hold onto Gostkowski: $4.3 million this season, a tiny fraction of the league’s $177.2 salary cap.
The Bears, for a time, were like the Patriots. They had one of the league’s steadiest kickers, a remarkable accomplishment given the harrowing conditions for kickers at Soldier Field. But before the 2016 season, they cut Robbie Gould, one of the most accurate kickers in NFL history, when he was set to be paid one of the richest salaries for a kicker at the time.
Then the Bears found that kickers are less fungible than they imagined. The next two seasons, they cycled through three kickers. They finished in the bottom six in field-goal percentage in both 2016 and 2017.
“When you have somebody who can handle the elements in Chicago and succeed, then you’re foolish to let him go,” said Jay Feely, the former NFL kicker and current CBS analyst.
After those underwhelming results, Chicago turned to someone new yet again. That was Cody Parkey, a journeyman who had played for three teams in the four seasons before 2018. The year before joining the Bears, the fourth team in his career, he had made 91.3% of his field goals for the Dolphins.
Parkey, like many other kickers in Chicago, saw his numbers dip. He hit 76.3% of his field goals for the Bears during the regular season—sixth-lowest in the league. He hit his first three attempts in the wild-card game against the Eagles and it looked like he hit the game-winner—until the referee blew his whistle because Philadelphia had called a timeout. Then came the tip, the doink and the second doink.
Other teams still alive in the playoffs have been haunted by kicking woes. The Chiefs are 4-16 in their postseason history, in no small part due to a procession of missed kicks, dating all the way back to their famous double-overtime loss to the Dolphins in 1971, when Jan Stenerud missed a series of kicks that still trigger fans in Kansas City.
But recently, nobody has been as tormented as the Chargers, who have cycled through six kickers in the past two seasons alone. In 2017, they were last in the NFL in field-goal percentage.
Those tribulations continued this season when Chargers coach Anthony Lynn remembered a name from his past. When Lynn was an assistant under Rex Ryan, they traveled together to watch Ryan’s son, who walked on at Clemson and held kicks in high school for someone with uncanny leg strength and accuracy. When the Chargers were looking for a new kicker midway through this season, that same kicker was in the back of Lynn’s mind so they gave him a call. And Michael Badgley made 93.8% of his kicks over the team’s final 10 games before going 5-for-6, including a 53-yarder, in the team’s wild-card win over the Ravens.
“You hear all that,” Badgley says of the Chargers’ kicking history. “In close games, every point matters.”
Hours after Badgley hit his five kicks, Parkey missed his potential game-winner. During the game, a man in the stands tweeted a video of two boys cheering, with the comment: “Teaching these boys the history of da @bears.” The tweet was from the most accurate kicker in the NFL over the last three years, the one the Bears let go: Robbie Gould.
—Rachel Bachman contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Beaton at [email protected]
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