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.
Myers has had a strange career by any measure except the one that applies to his particular profession. There was little indication that he was a NFL prospect after four years as the kicker at Marist, a FCS school that, he told Center Field Marist reporter Ben Leeds, “just called out of the blue my senior year” of high school. (“Honestly,” Myers told Leeds, “I had no idea where Marist was.” It is in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) Myers made just 63 percent of his kicks during his years there, and while his personal best 49-yard field goal set a school record, neither that accomplishment nor anything in the statistical record or game tape necessarily suggested that a future NFL career awaited him. But an Arena League team called, and Myers played for the San Jose SaberCats and Arizona Rattlers that year. After the season, Myers worked as a valet in order to fund six months of intensive kicking lessons with the former NFL placekicker Michael Husted. When he auditioned for scouts after the 2014 Senior Bowl, Myers had reconfigured his technique entirely, and ultimately kicked well enough to beat out Josh Scobee for Jacksonville’s job as a 24-year-old rookie. (A headline in the St. Augustine Record read, “Rookie Jason Myers becomes Jaguars kicker after mediocre college career.”) Myers had been out of college for two-and-a-half years when he made his NFL debut; he missed an extra point and a 44-yarder in that game, but went on to kick well enough to keep the job for two seasons, until he kicked poorly enough to lose it.
The point being that there is a lot of variability here. Teams just don’t seem to understand any of this very well or prioritize this aspect of player development very effectively, and while they know that good kickers are important, they remain confused about where to find them. NFL kickers really are better than they have ever been, but still seem to come out of nowhere. More precisely, they come out of an independent instructional scene in which coaches, many of them ex-pros like Husted, teach hopefuls like Myers how to kick at the highest level, and then get them in front of NFL scouts at what The Athletic’s Dan Robson described in 2025 as “a carousel of combines and showcases” run by other former pro kickers. While it is delightful that Jason Myers has had such a fine NFL career—two Pro Bowl selections, a 2020 season in which he made all 24 of his field goal attempts, the scoring record he just took from Literally LaDainian Tomlinson—after having barely been recruited out of high school and kicking unremarkably for an FCS program in college, it is not unprecedented. The high-leverage volatility and seemingly inherent randomness makes it one of the sport’s last and most egregiously unsolved mysteries.
Football has generally dealt with this stubborn ambiguity more or less as you might expect, which is by getting upset about it. No important player on a NFL roster is more fungible, or likelier to be cut after a bad game or two, than a kicker. There’s an obviously cheesy theatricality to that familiar maneuver—an embattled coach in a moment of crisis Sending A Message by subjecting the smallest man in the locker room to a radical executive accountability moment—but all that signifying mostly points back to how little anyone involved gets about any of this. A team can always just go get another kicker, although they will not necessarily know anything more about that kicker or how he might kick than they did about the one he’ll replace. Despite that or because of it, teams do this over and over again.
Kickers know this, too. When Myers gave one of my favorite postgame quotes ever, he had been the Jaguars kicker for two years and part of a third, and sensed that he was about to lose his job. In a 27-17 home loss to the Rams in Week 6 of the 2017 season, Myers’ opening kickoff was returned 103 yards for a touchdown by Pharoh Cooper, and he missed two of his three field goal attempts. Both misses were from more than 50 yards out, his second and third misses from that distance on the season in as many attempts. “He had missed enough 50-yard FGs in the 2016–17 seasons that the Jags were considering a change,” AP reporter Mark Long remembered. “Everyone knew it, including him.” When Long asked Myers about those struggles, Myers gave an answer that was both strikingly honest and delivered in unusually pointed syntax. It is rather jarringly close to the answer I imagine myself giving in a similar moment of professional crisis when asked, “How are you enjoying your moment of professional crisis?”
The Jags cut Myers before Week 7. “Of course, I remember getting the quote,” Long told me on Sunday night. “Even with Jason playing well on the West Coast the last seven years, I know every time he misses a field goal or an extra point because I get notifications of someone retweeting that one.” I have certainly been a part of the problem, there, but after a game in which Seattle’s kicking unit was as dominant as any kicking unit could be—in addition to Myers’s perfect evening, punter Michael Dickson repeatedly pinned the Patriots against their own end zone in the second half—it was nice to imagine Myers repeating the same quote, in these new and entirely upside-down circumstances, in precisely the opposite tone. After a decade trying to manage the strange fortune of one of sports’ weirdest and least understood jobs, it probably felt great, and really was awesome.