The 40-49 yarder is crucial in football. Missing it is like a turnover plus 7 yards. An above average NFL kicker should make most of them -- 10/12 or so should be the expectation. Some kickers were better than that. More than 3 misses in a year is bad.
So far Gostkowski has made one and missed one. Is it time to panic? Well, probably not. If he nails 9 of 10 for the rest of the year, great.
But there's some evidence that perhaps misses from this distance are not aberrational or a small sample size problem. What is that evidence:
1) He missed 4 of them last year -- more than any other player other than Akers.
2) He also missed 2 kicks last year of 30-39 yards. That's unacceptable if it becomes a trend. If a guy misses a couple in a year, whatever, you chalk it up to small sample size problems or crazy blocked kicks or something. But if he does it a few years in a row, you can't have him on your team. But with Gostkowsi we're starting to get some evidence this isn't a small sample size problem. Put it together with the four misses from 40-49 and you have six misses from 30-49 -- most in the NFL last year. To be sure, he had more attempts than many in the league -- so his overall percentage is just "bad," not "horrible." (He was 20th in the league in FG percentage last year.) Again, my goal here is not to get stuck on small sample size problems, but instead to see what the evidence in total shows.
3) His one 40+ make this year did not exactly inspire confidence. It was a low line drive on a distance and in conditions where that was entirely unnecessary.
4) He missed from 44 and 50 in preseason. So, there's suspicion than 1-2 so far this year is continuation of a trend, not counter to a trend.
5) This one is totally subjective -- I have no expertise whatsoever in kicking. His balls move way too much. His kicks don't look to me like others in the league -- they never have. Even his extra points move right or left and have a knuckleball effect. On kicks longer than 35 yards, I can't say I notice any consistency -- no draw or slice or even height uniformity. I go to 8 games a year in Arizona, so watch warmups and of course have seen lots of field goal kicks in person. Everyone sees a bunch of them on tv and lots of you go to more game than I do, so I have no special expertise. But by and large, most kickers are very very uniform. Off the foot, unless it's a total mi****, the kicks all look the same. End over end high balls with roughly the same trajectory designed for maximum distance. Very little left to right action -- you can usually tell off the foot whether it's starting out middle, left, right, and it usually stays there. A few kickers have a draw action and so work the ball a bit, but it's very consistent. The only exceptions are for very long kicks where guys drive it low or kicks in weather. Gost's kicks are all over the place. It's not always that same high, end over end trajectory that every other kicker seems to use. They start left, they start right, they start low, they start high, they move left, they move right (although more left to right usually), they knuckle. Belichick and the offense seem to put a premium on getting him in the middle of the field, which I think is right given there's no consistency in which way the ball goes, so you just ask him to try to hit it straight and then he has margin on either side.
I really would like know if there are any other kickers out there who we might be able to use, because we can't have another season with six misses from 30-49. Not this year. He got it away with it last year in all but one game. We may not have the same margins this year.
Edit -- Ha, the auto program thinks the word mis-hit when typed without the hypen is a swear. That's funny.
