It’s week one of the 2025 NFL season, and the Atlanta Falcons are counting on their longtime kicker, Younghoe Koo, to send the game to overtime. The Falcons are in a new era with second-year quarterback Michael Penix Jr., and the team is looking to start off with an early win against their division rivals, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. With the team down three points with six seconds left in regulation, Koo lines up for what should be a routine 44-yard field goal to tie up the game.
Koo has nailed countless long-range kicks throughout his career; 44-yards should be automatic. The announcers even nicknamed him “Ice Cold Koo” for his ability to stay calm under pressure. The Atlanta crowd goes quiet, waiting, itching for the deafening crowd pop.
The snap is good, and so is the hold—but the crowd does not burst into cheers. The former Pro Bowl kicker hooks it wide right. Not even close. The Buccaneers win, and the Falcons’ Instagram account is flooded with hate comments.
“KOO IS NOT ALLOWED IN THE CITY OF ATLANTA,” said user @thekingbjr.
“Blast Koo to the sun,” wrote @atlfalconstherapy.
Koo, who had been helping Atlanta win for the past seven years, was immediately benched after his first miss of the season. He was released from the team just weeks later.
Most NFL fans know that kickers are more accurate than they were 10 years ago. The three longest field goals in football history have been kicked in the 2020s, with Dallas Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey tying for the third-best with a 64-yarder in week two of this year. Jacksonville Jaguar Cam Little even hit a gargantuan 70-yard kick in the 2025 preseason.
And yet, fans and journalists often find themselves asking the same question: ‘Why are kickers bad this year?’ It seems writers from CBS, The Athletic, and Diario AS are on the same page as angry viewers on Reddit or Quora. The cause of this? A significant break between reality—that being the statistics of kickers—and how fans view and interpret the game.
The NFL’s social media presence has increased dramatically in the past decade. This applies to sports news organizations like ESPN and Bleacher Report, and the official accounts of NFL teams. The NFL’s Instagram account has well over 30 million followers.
On social media, posts with more comments reach more users. An outlet, such as Bleacher Report, would be more likely to post Koo’s game-losing miss against Tampa Bay on Instagram than his two successful field goal attempts earlier in the game. This is both because the missed attempt is more newsworthy, and because a post about the miss, and the subsequent wave of negative comments, boosts the post in the Instagram algorithm—meaning more clicks. For the Falcons fans who missed the game, or other NFL fans who were focused on their own team that Sunday, the missed kick is likely all they will see.
High-profile misses being promoted by social media are not the only reason the perception of kickers is skewed. While 50 to 60 yard kicks are more likely to fall between the uprights now than they were 10 years ago, shorter kicks have not seen such a dramatic improvement.
Conor McLaughlin shows that there has been dramatic improvement over the past 10 years in 50 to 55 yard attempts, with 60-plus yard kicks being hard to judge due to how rare attempts are. Kicks between 20 and 40 yards, however, have experienced little change over the past 10 years. The improvements in long-range kicks throughout the past decade may increase a fan’s expectations when their kicker lines up for a short-range kick. However, the statistical correlation between the two appears to be very minor.
Due to improvements in long-range kicks, coaches feel more comfortable sending out their kicker in a 50-plus yard range as opposed to punting the ball away. In 2014, 160 field goal kicks from over 50 yards were attempted, but by 2024, that number was at a whopping 287, according to Team Rankings.
The normalization of 50-plus yard kicks in the viewers’ minds may lead to an assumption that they are “automatic.” NBC Sports even wrote that these kicks are becoming “no big deal.” Despite the fact that it is becoming more common for 50-plus yard attempts to be successful, their 69.7% success rate in 2024 is still drastically low compared to 30 to 49 yard kicks, which saw an 84.5% success rate the same year.
Multiple teams in the past decade have also made the uncommon choice to take a kicker early in the draft. Using this high draft capital on kickers puts increased pressure on young players like Jake Moody, Cade York, and Roberto Aguayo, who all faced significant challenges and were cut by their respective teams after just a few years. Recently, undrafted players such as Chris Boswell, Jake Bates, and the previously mentioned Brandon Aubrey have been some of the strongest kickers in the league.
Another factor that may skew the interpretation of kicker accuracy is the extra point. Before 2015, the extra point was a nearly automatic 20-yard kick. But after a rule change meant to encourage two-point conversions was put into place, the extra point was moved back to a 33-yard kick. In the year that rule went into effect, extra point percentage dropped from 99.3% to 94.2%.
In 2024, a record high 1,115 field goals were attempted across the NFL. The more kicks an NFL fan sees, the more likely they are to see a miss. With social media promoting videos of high-profile misses and with hate comments calling for the jobs of kickers who make errors, it is easy to feel that there is some sort of kicker epidemic plaguing the NFL.
In actuality, kickers are stronger and more accurate than ever before, and field goal kicking is in its prime. With training and conditioning developing further and further each season, fans have the opportunity to view players that may prove to be the greatest kickers of their generation. So the next time your team’s kicker lines up to try a game winner, the odds are that you are in better hands than you were 10 years ago.
