UNDER PRESSURE

The Pressures of Being a Football Placekicker

By Bennett Palmer

It’s near the end of the first half of a regular-season game on Dec. 8, 2013, in Denver, Colorado. It’s freezing. Most players and fans just want the game to end so they can go home. They aren’t expecting what’s about to happen. The Denver Broncos kicker, Matt Prater, is attempting to do the impossible. A 64yard field goal. It would break the NFL record if it went through the uprights. He can’t even feel his foot, but he starts the motion anyway. The kick is up, it’s turning, turning, turning… he did it. The crowd goes crazy, or however crazy you can get in this below-freezing temperature. Matt Prater has just climbed the mountaintop of kicking. And nobody cared.

Kicking the football has been around almost as long as the game itself. In 1883, the official scoring system for football recognized a field goal as five points and a touchdown as four points. It really was foot-ball back then. However, as the game grew, so did the scoring. Touchdowns were becoming more and more important, eventually fitting into the puzzle piece of six points and an extra point, and field goals becoming a pitiful three points.

In the 1960s and 70s, kicking the football hit its peak of popularity, with the longest field goals being hit left and right in college football and the professional level. The fad soon faded, however, and skill positions, like the wide receiver or running back, became the main and only real focus to the average viewer.

After Matt Prater kicked his amazing 64 yarders, he was number one on SportsCenter for a few days, had a few articles written about him, and he had become known as the biggest leg in the NFL.

“I was clueless,” Prater said about the kick. “Because I had to rush out there, I didn’t really think about it.”

Ecstasy had only set in after the field goal itself, but that ecstasy faded in a few weeks. It was over. Back to being the kicker, the odd man out, the other guy. The pressure of being an NFL kicker set in once again.

Prater was lucky in this sense, as many kickers are in their heads the whole season. A missed field goal or extra point can borough in your mind and settle there for a while. NFL great Martin Gramatica was an exceptional kicker, but the pressure got to even him.

Speaking about the pressures from his team and fans, he said, “All they know is the kicker missed an extra point. You feel like you let the whole team down, and that can start to get into your head.”

In today’s specialized football landscape, the kickers are held to an even higher standard than before. High school football kickers are expected to nail 30, 40 even 50-yard field goals. BVN’s football coach, Adam Pummill, is very involved with his squad’s kickers and had his own opinion about those expectations.

“It’s an incredibly important job with a lot of pressure,” He says. “It’s a position where if you don’t get warmed up, there’s not a lot you can do as a kicker.”

Kickers can be seen as expendable, more than most other positions on a football field.

“Kickers are like taxi cabs,” said famously by NFL coach and Football Hall of Famer, Buddy Ryan. “You can always go out and hire another one.”

High school and college ball are definitely more relaxed with this expectation than in the NFL, however. BVN’s situation with their kickers is a competition between two talented players, Caleb Asjes and Mateo Linkous, both making their cases in practice drills and in games.

photo by Max Wolf

“It feels good to contribute to the team,” said Linkous, a sophomore who has played mostly soccer his whole life. “I played linebacker, but they needed a kicker, so I just fell into the position.”

That is the thing with high school kickers. Most of the time, kicking is not their only job. Both kickers, Asjes and Linkous, have secondary positions on the field, wide receiver and linebacker respectively. Even NFL kicker greats, like George Blanda, did not play placekicker exclusively. In fact, Blanda was just as good as a quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, which ended up sending him to the Football Hall of Fame.

All in all, the importance of kicking in football can be seen in the largest moments of each game: the tipping point, the last position, the game-winner. Kickers from all levels, from high school to the professional game, have to deal with this tremendous responsibility.

Football kicking legend, Morten Andersen, said it best about being the odd man out on the football field.

“Sports has a beautiful way of allowing you into a group of guys and just being accepted,” he said, at his National Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2017. “That’s the common denominator, that we’re doing something together here, we’re a part of a team.”

Kicker Caleb Asjes kicks off after a touchdown.

Photo by Anna Sandage