For a team with Super Bowl aspirations, the Green Bay Packers know that they have to get the kicker position right this season, and they’ve been turning over every rock in an effort to do so.
As we’ve seen over and over again throughout the NFL, the margin between winning and losing is very small. Since the year 2000, there have been 6,176 regular season games played and over 36 percent of those contests have been determined by three points or fewer. The most common margin of victory during that same span is three points, happening 929 times.
A missed field goal or a missed extra point can often be the difference between a win and a loss.
Since the Packers’ 2023 season ended, in an effort to bring in competition for Anders Carlson and find the best kicker for the upcoming year, we’ve seen Brian Gutekunst sign Jack Podlesny just a few days after the playoff loss in San Francisco. Then, in free agency, the Packers would add Greg Joseph to the mix.
Following offseason programs, the Packers tried to bring in record-breaking UFL kick Jake Bates, but he ended up signing with Detroit. Gutekunst would then claim James Turner off waivers and release Podlesny.
“We’re appreciative of certainly Brian getting it to the point where it’s at right now, having a three-man competition,” said Rich Bisaccia during OTAs. “We’ll see how long we can keep that going.”
The Packers’ apparent decision to carry three kickers into training camp shows their commitment to fostering as much competition as possible.
As special teams coordinator Rich Bisaccia has noted in the past, making sure that each kicker gets his share of opportunities during those practices becomes more challenging when having to make sure there are enough reps to go around for three kickers. And in the uncontrolled environment of a preseason game, that becomes an even bigger task.
As a workaround for carrying three kickers during OTAs and minicamp, the Packers’ kickers would alternate days off, with two competing and one sitting out. However, by the end, Matt LaFleur had all of them kicking on the same day to provide a more apples-to-apples comparison, with each of them kicking in the same conditions.
LaFleur and Bisaccia are evaluating these kickers each day, but as LaFleur mentioned, this competition may not begin to truly take shape until there are more of those “high-pressure, game-like” situations.
The preseason games may be the best barometer for how each player performs in those more high-leverage situations, although the two-minute drills during practice help turn up the intensity as well.
LaFleur has even taken it a step further in an effort to cultivate some high-pressure situations, ending practice on two occasions with each kicker having to make an attempt with the music blaring and their teammates huddled closely around them, yelling and throwing water.
“Just make it as difficult as possible on the kickers,” said LaFleur during OTAs. “We wanna put ’em in situations that are pretty uncomfortable. I would say that’s a pretty uncomfortable. Nowhere in ball are you gonna have an entire team lined up around you, but just to try to amp up that level of pressure and it was good to see that last one go through the uprights.”
From the outside looking in, this appears to be a very fluid situation for the Packers, given how the offseason has unfolded to this point. Whether it be carrying just two kickers or swapping one kicker out for someone else, that will be dependent on how everyone is performing.
Both Carlson and Joseph had their moments during offseason programs, but ultimately it will come down to day-to-day consistency that determines who the Packers kicker will be come Week 1.
“We’re going to keep investigating to try to end up with the best player we possibly can,” added Bisaccia.
