Luke Braun's Naive Attempt To Make Sense Of Kickers
Luke Braun delves deep into kicker mechanics and his own personal traumas to evaluate what makes a good kicker besides "mental toughness."
It’s September 16th, 2018. With three seconds left in overtime, rookie Daniel Carlson lines up for a 35-yard attempt. With two misses already on the day, it’s a perfect chance to right his mind. 35 yards is a relatively easy kick and would complete an exciting, improbable comeback. The two misses could wash away in triumph.
Instead, this.
Carlson pushed the kick to the right, and the Vikings and Packers walked away with an awkward tie. Within 24 hours Carlson would be out of a job. He’d end his Vikings tenure 1-for-4.
Carlson famously turned things around. Since signing in Oakland, Carlson has kicked at a 90% clip, made a first- and second-team All-Pro, co-led the league in scoring in 2020 and 2021, and set the NFL record for 50+ yard makes in a season.
After this game, the Vikings signed the legendary Dan Bailey, who ranked 31st in field goal percentage in 2018. After ranking 25th in 2020, the Vikings released him and replaced him with Greg Joseph, who never ranked in the top half of kickers by the same metric in his three years as a Viking.
Until recently, I’ve thought of kicking as random and streaky. Statistically, it is — unless your kicker is specifically Justin Tucker, he’s probably not going to separate himself from the pack enough to warrant expensive investment. I thought it was more mental than physical, as evidenced by the steep decline of Billy Cundiff after his high-profile miss, or countless other stories of perfectly good kickers falling apart after famous errors.
But Carlson’s story runs counter to those of Cundiff, Doug Brien, or Mike Vanderjagt. After a high-profile kicking catastrophe that led to his immediate release, he fixed the issue and found consistent success.
We’re now far enough away from this incident for the principal actors to share their feelings in hindsight. Rick Spielman would later say he regretted cutting Carlson. How could you not, after seeing Carlson consistently climb to the top of the kicking mountain for half a decade while your team struggles to tread water?
Carlson, however, doesn’t agree. He acknowledges that his issues wouldn’t have been fixed without the kick in the pants that his release gave him. He doesn’t see the situation as many Vikings fans do — that Rick Spielman sold low on an ascending star that just needed a little patience. There was something wrong that needed to be fixed. Carlson didn’t have time to fix it mid-season, but one week of unemployment gave him the space he needed to correct the issue.
Carlson told ESPN’s Courtney Cronin in 2019:
“I was too far away from the ball from where I was starting. [...] Those steps going to the ball were going to be a little longer”.
He stood roughly two feet closer in Oakland and the results speak for themselves.
So perhaps kicking isn’t random like a dice roll. It may be better to think of it like the weather — difficult to reliably map out over time, but determined by factors we can come to understand.
To help us do so, we can turn to Jay Nunez, Alabama’s Special Teams Coordinator, who gave a talk for Glazier Clinics where he discussed kicking mechanics as well as operational drills. I’ll be referring to it a lot, so if you have a Glazier login, I recommend it.
How 20 Inches Fixed Daniel Carlson
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Wide Left to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
 | A guest post by
|