It Feels Great, Dude

The history of professional football is long and strange enough to include a placekicker or two who had "a normal career." Theoretically. I have found scant evidence of that, but presumably there has been or could be a kicker that performed as a pro more or less in the way that their college career and draft position indicated they would, and was consistent about it year after and year over year. Stranger things have happened. Or, anyway, all kinds of strange things happen.

Given the fine NFL career that he's put together over the last 11 years, it made sense that Jason Myers converted all five of his field goal attempts in Seattle's Super Bowl win on Sunday, setting a Super Bowl record. It seems wrong in some deep but ultimately inconsequential way that doing so nudged him ahead of LaDainian Tomlinson's greatest season—2006, when he set a league record for rushing touchdowns with 28—to make Myers' 2025 campaign the highest individual scoring season in NFL history, but given how kickers are and what kickers do, that is not really all that strange either. The player that Tomlinson passed to set that rushing touchdown record was Shaun Alexander, who was taken two picks after the Raiders selected kicker Sebastian Janikowski with the 17th pick of the first round back in 2000. Alexander won an MVP, but was done in the NFL by 2008; Janikowski kicked for 18 seasons and retired at the age of 40, after having beaten out, huh, Jason Myers for Seattle's placekicking gig. (Myers caught on with the Jets that year, made the Pro Bowl, and signed a free-agent deal with Seattle in 2019.)

What does this mean? Nothing much, really. It was absolutely deranged, even by that organization's standards, for the Raiders to select a kicker with the 17th pick of the NFL draft, but even a comparatively busted kicking phenom can still wind up with a long and accomplished career, especially relative to someone whose job involves getting tackled 40 times per game. More than that, though, no one really seems to understand how kicking or kickers work, even still, or how to value the people that do it. A kicker like Cam Little, whose unprecedented range more or less upended the sport in his team's favor last season, was still available in the sixth round of the draft in 2024. Brandon Aubrey never kicked a football in a game during his four years at Notre Dame, didn't make his NFL debut until he was 28, and has been All-Pro in every season since. Justin Tucker, probably the greatest kicker of his era, went undrafted after a stellar college career at Texas and was later revealed to be a serial sex creep.