With Dustin Hopkins added to the injury report with a quad injury, the Chargers could potentially be in the band-aid kicker market.
With minor injuries like Hopkins’, teams usually sign a player to their practice squad and use one of that player’s three elevations to avoid using two roster spots on a kicker. Therefore, poaching a kicker from another team’s practice squad is probably not a viable option.
Here are a few kickers on the street Los Angeles could bring in.
Rodrigo Blankenship
Blankenship was cut by the Colts after Week 1 this season and has yet to land a new job despite missing just one kick in Indianapolis’ season opener. Historically, Blankenship is an accurate short-distance kicker: on field goals 39 yards or shorter, he’s missed only twice in his 22-game career. He’s also 52 of 55 on extra points. The problems start from 40 yards and out, where Blankenship is 16 of 23 and just 1 of 4 on kicks 50 or more yards. The former Georgia kicker has also suffered a hip injury that cut his 2021 season to just five games. Hip injuries are often career killers for kickers. But for a team as aggressive on fourth down as the Chargers, an accurate short kicker could be all they need.
Dominik Eberle
Eberle was in the NFL most recently of the names on this list, kicking for the Lions in Week 4. Unfortunately, he missed two extra points and barely snuck his other kicks inside the uprights in a game Detroit only lost by two points. Eberle was cut partially because incumbent kicker Austin Seibert should be back from injury this week, but Detroit added Michael Badgley on Tuesday as insurance rather than sticking with Eberle. Still, the NFL by and large tries out the same cadre of kickers over an entire season, and Eberle has most recently won one of those tryouts. Keep an eye on him as a potential visitor in the coming days.
Ryan Santoso
If your concern is kickoffs, might I recommend the big-legged Santoso, who has the power to drive every kickoff into or out the back of the end zone? Santoso spent most of this preseason in Jacksonville, where special teams coordinator Heath Farwell described his leg strength as “elite.” Despite that, he was released before playing a regular season game with Jacksonville, who opted to add other teams’ cast-offs and hold a brand new competition leading up to Week 1. As a result, Santoso only has seven career games across the 2019 and 2021 seasons under his belt, missing one field goal and two extra points in those opportunities.
Nick Sciba
The most accurate kicker in college football history, I was a bit surprised that Sciba didn’t catch on anywhere else after spending a few months as Chris Boswell’s understudy. Usually, kickers that sign to teams with established starters do so as an internship before landing somewhere else and earning a job. (Think of every Ravens kicker they’ve traded for late-round picks while Justin Tucker has been there.) Sciba never missed an extra point in his Wake Forest career and went 80 of 89 on field goals, but his career-long was 49 yards. Whether that was a Demon Deacon thing or a Nick Sciba thing is a question that’s largely gone unanswered, but the fact that he’s still on the street in Week 5 tells me his leg is probably far from the strongest.
Elliott Fry
Fry is perhaps best known as being the Falcons’ practice squad yo-yo last season, but he’s also spent time on eight other NFL teams as the perpetual 33rd-best kicker in the league. In three career games split between Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, Fry is 5 of 6 on field goals and 5 of 7 on extra points. He lost a competition in Jacksonville to Santoso because of a hip injury, which could also explain why he hasn’t been picked up by a new team yet. Fry was also not among the group of kickers Detroit worked out on Tuesday before signing Badgley. That group included Sam Ficken, Lirim Hajrullahu, Brian Johnson, and Andrew Mevis. Perhaps that means Fry is not yet healthy. But if he is, the Chargers giving him his tenth NFL uniform may be in the cards.
