The Gang That Cant Kick Straight
By JUDY BATTISTA
Published: December 22, 2009

The Dallas Cowboys dumped one kicker and signed a new one Monday, and in a fitting sign of the times, the winner was the kicker who lost his job with another team two weeks ago after missing a 23-yard field-goal attempt. Still, Shaun Suisham is viewed as an improvement over Nick Folk, who missed seven of his last 11 attempts to help imperil the Cowboys playoff hopes and contribute to a sagging N.F.L. skill: field-goal kicking.

Nick Folk made the Pro Bowl as a rookie but was cut this season, his third. He is not the only kicker having trouble finding the uprights. More Photos >

Changing kickers this late in the season is on no teams to-do list, but plenty of coaches share the frustration of Cowboys Coach Wade Phillips. A year after field-goal accuracy was the highest in N.F.L. history (84.5 percent, according to the Elias Sports Bureau), and after a decade of steadily increasing precision, kickers are surprisingly in a slump.

They have converted 80.5 percent of field-goal attempts this season, the lowest rate since 2003. And if they do not improve, which they are unlikely to do because of deteriorating weather, they will have the biggest one-year drop since 1976, when accuracy hovered around 60 percent, according to Elias.

You should be able to put a ball down sideways and make a 23-yarder, said the Jets special-teams coach, Mike Westhoff, whose field-goal unit committed the unholy trinity of errors bad snap, bad hold, bad kick in missing three attempts Sunday.

In an era in which every kick is analyzed, field conditions scrutinized and weather patterns charted, coaches and players seem dumbfounded by the sudden drop.

Its a lot, said Bobby April, the Buffalo Bills special-teams coach. I have no answer why, except guys are just missing. If its down in this part of December, its going to be down even more.

The decline is especially surprising because not too long ago, field-goal kicking seemed so automatic that there was discussion about moving the uprights closer together or the hash marks farther apart to create more difficult kicking angles. Instead, the degree of difficulty went up without any tinkering.

Kickers are not just struggling with long kicks of more than 50 yards (down to 53.2 percent this season from 63.5 percent last season), but also with the medium-range kicks that teams rely on in close games. On kicks from 40 to 49 yards, accuracy has dropped to 71.4 percent from 74.5 percent in 2008. From 30 to 39 yards, the drop is to 82.7 percent from 89.1 percent.

Not surprisingly, there is a deterrent effect. Last year, teams attempted 1,000 field goals in the regular season; teams are on a pace to try 933 this season.

Field-goal success rates have truly been increasing since 2001, said Harold Sackrowitz, a Rutgers University statistics professor. Of course, no one could expect them to increase indefinitely. Since this years rate is significantly lower than last years, it is possible that kickers have reached a plateau and we will continue to see up-and-down random fluctuations in future years.

But a more popular explanation was voiced by Westhoff. He wondered if the plethora of younger kickers, combined with a shortage of talented ones straight from college like Sebastian Janikowski, contributed to the decline. Eight teams are using kickers with four years or less of experience.

That does not explain why Jacksonvilles Josh Scobee, in his sixth season, has had his accuracy plummet by more than 10 percentage points from last season or why the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who have gone through three kickers and have converted a league-worst 13 of 23 field-goal attempts, are having better luck with Connor Barth, in his second N.F.L. season, than they did with Mike Nugent, a former second-round pick in his fifth season.

Still, logic and anecdotal evidence suggested that inexperienced kickers are more inconsistent. Green Bays Mason Crosby, in his third season, has missed a field-goal attempt from inside 43 yards in four straight games. Baltimore dropped a first-year kicker, Steve Hauschka, this season after he hit only 69.2 percent of his attempts. And the accuracy of Stephen Gostkowski, New Englands fourth-year kicker, has dropped to 82.8 percent this season from 90 percent last season.

I cant remember in the last recent years a number of guys coming out of college that I said, Cant miss; going to be a star, Westhoff said. I havent felt in the last five years the number of guys coming out I looked at and said somebody is going to do great.

Hauschka, who has tried out for other teams since the Ravens cut him, said that field-goal kickers were so good in recent years that it would be hard for any kickers, veterans or rookies, to maintain that rate. Still, he marveled at how veterans are able to repeat their leg swing exactly the same way over and over again, a mark of the best kickers.

For young kickers, that may be more difficult than it is for older kickers, Hauschka said. Some of those misses are things you can attribute to pressure, and you can attribute to just getting used to kicking in the N.F.L. For some reason, its different than kicking in college. Its mentally different. Its your livelihood, and there are all types of coaches and media on you. The expectations are much higher for an N.F.L. kicker than for a college kicker.

Folk, 25, is young, too this is his third season and his struggle seems to be as much mental as technical. He made the Pro Bowl as a rookie, and in his first two seasons, his accuracy was 86.8 percent. In those two seasons, he missed only one kick from 40 to 49 yards long. This season, he has made 5 of 12 from that distance and leads the league with 10 misses over all.

Its a mystery to us, Phillips said.

In an attempt to help Folk before cutting him, the Cowboys harked back to one of their bleakest moments, making quarterback Tony Romo the holder for field-goal attempts after it seemed Mat McBriars holds were contributing to Folks misses.

Until two weeks ago, the last time Romo held for the Cowboys was in a 2007 playoff game, when he bobbled the snap to botch a short go-ahead field-goal attempt in the final minutes of a loss to Seattle. Romo was in tears when he apologized after that game, and Phillips joked the next season that Romo was retired from holding.

In the persnickety world of kicking, the hold is a critical element. A right-footed kicker wants the ball tilted slightly to the right, which helps him kick it straight. If it is tilted to the left or if the holder puts it in a spot even millimeters off from the spot on the ground where the kicker wants it, it can throw off the kickers finely tuned timing, with disastrous results.

Its not easy to switch holders in the middle of the year, said Jets kicker Jay Feely, who switched to Kellen Clemens after Steve Weatherford botched a hold in overtime against Buffalo this season, and watched as Clemens bobbled at least one hold Sunday. A holder can make you miss almost every kick and nobody would be able to tell. It takes a good three weeks to a month to where youre not really thinking about it.

Folk and the Cowboys did not have that kind of time. With Romo holding, Folk made a 44-yarder Saturday night against the Saints before missing the 24-yarder that doomed him.

Missed kicks are so pervasive that even if the kickers slump proves to be just a blip on the statistical radar, they may still earn a place in N.F.L. history. After all, the Houston Texans are still wondering what might have been if their kicker, Kris Brown, had made a 42-yard field-goal attempt to send a game against the unbeaten Indianapolis Colts into overtime.

Perfection might be achieved in the N.F.L. this season, but not by kickers.