By Ronald J. Hansen

It’s a question that hasn’t ignited the kind of debate around the greatest quarterbacks or best running backs or, well, probably any other position.

But when you think how many games are decided by a field goal or less, why not argue over who is the NFL’s best?

If you can dream about having Tom Brady or Joe Montana or Johnny Unitas, why not at least think about whether you would rather have Adam Vinatieri or Gary Anderson or Fred Cox?

Like most of these debates, there’s no clear answer. There is only strong evidence to support an argument. I’m still thinking over my answer, and I can definitely be persuaded that someone might be better than his stats, or why this stat means more than others.

I like stats, and I used to love kicking a football. I wasn’t especially gifted at it, but I can certainly appreciate it. A while back, I downloaded all the NFL field goal data between 1960 and 2021 from Stathead’s website. (I also like spreadsheets, so this was a nerdy fun task, too.)

I need to see if I can get data from earlier years because that would offer a more meaningful measure of Lou Groza, for example. I would also like to get the past two seasons just for completeness. I put the data into a spreadsheet that allows me to quickly find answers to fairly specific questions.

I can, for example, tell you whether kickers did better at Mile High Stadium or the Orange Bowl (It’s Denver at 66 percent over Miami with 62 percent.) I can tell you how visiting kickers did in December in Cleveland Municipal Stadium from 40 yards or farther (9 of 21 for 43 percent).

I can’t tell you time of the game for each kick or the order they happened. So, if someone blew a 32-yarder with 15 seconds left in the game and made three 40-yarders before that, all I see is they were three of four for the day. I also don’t know the weather. I’ve added whether the games were on grass or turf or in a dome. But December is December, whether it was sunny and 55 or frozen and 4 below.

So, that’s the setup. Here’s how I think about this.

For one, longevity matters. There are 163 kickers who have attempted 100 or more field goals since 1960. There are 105 who attempted 200 or more. There are 32 who kicked at least 400 times. That’s where I set the minimum. If you think about it, that means someone offered a lot of data points for consideration and NFL teams showed a lot of faith in that player to keep sending him out there.

Accuracy is a really big deal. Matt Bahr and his brother Chris Bahr kicked in basically the same era. Chris attempted 381 FGs. Matt attempted 415. I consider those pretty similar numbers. The difference is Matt Bahr made 300 of his kicks and Chris Bahr made 241. That’s 72 percent for Matt Bahr and 63 percent for Chris Bahr. Over a career, that’s a big difference.

But accuracy can be misleading. This is important, so I want to hover over this for a bit.
Let’s compare Jan Stenerud and Sebastian Janikowski. Two foreign-born kickers with unique names from totally different eras. Heck, Stenerud was in his 12th season when Janikowski was born.
Stenerud had 558 attempts over his career. Janikowski had 542. Pretty similar.
Stenerud made 373 and Janikowski made 436. That works out to career percentages of 67 percent for Stenerud and 80 percent for Janikowski.

But to me that’s not the end of the story on accuracy. As late as 1963, NFL kickers made less than half their field goals (49 percent). In 1980, the league average was 64 percent. In 2000, it was 80 percent. In 2020, it was 85 percent.

When comparing players from totally different eras, it seems to me you need to compare them to the league as a whole. When you do that for Stenerud and Janikowski, things look different. Compared to the league average for the seasons he played, Stenerud was 4.6 percentage points better than the others. Janikowski was 1.8 percentage points worse than the league average for his career.

I’ve looked at the NFL’s kicking stats a lot of different ways. The improvement in kicking is really clear. In the 1960s, kickers made 74 percent of their field goals between 20 and 24 yards. In the 2020s, that’s the league average from 45 to 49 yards. The difference is staggering, but it’s also incremental. In other words, it’s not like kicking totally got better after 1995. It’s a gradual shift; kickers slowly got better.

Why? There are probably a lot of reasons, but the biggest is probably technique. Soccer-style kicking became common in the 1970s and Mark Moseley was probably the last straight-away kicker in the league when his career ended with the Browns in 1986. After that, kicking just got more refined or more competitive as more people competed for the few jobs in the NFL.

Surfaces matter, but not as much as you might think. The difference between kicks on turf and grass has never been more than 3 percentage points apart. In the 1970s, for example, kickers made 62 percent on turf and 61 percent on grass. In the 1990s, it was 78 percent vs. 76 percent. In the 2020s, it was less than 1 percentage point apart. Kicking on turf helps, but it’s not the answer.

Weather (and protection from it with domes) doesn’t explain it, either. Looking by decades, the difference between conversion rates in September and December doesn’t change much. In the 1970s, kickers made 61 percent in September and 61 percent in December. In the 2020s, they made 84 percent in September and 84 percent in December.

One other historical point to make is blocked kicks. There used to be a lot more of them in the old days. Part of that may be the change in rules now that limit contact with the snapper or running into the kicker. Part of that is the kickers themselves are able to get the ball up and away more efficiently than straight-away kickers who could not physically kick as far.

In the 1960s, 7 percent of field goal attempts were blocked. In the 2010s, it was 2 percent.
So the point is that the game has slowly evolved to a superior point of kicking today, but does that mean Jan Stenerud and those of earlier eras were just worse? Strictly speaking, sure, if you want to be harsh about it.

They also played on multi-purpose, grass-only fields with fewer choices in footwear and worse understanding of strength training and with fewer protections from penalties. Add in the less-accurate straight-away style of kicking that prevailed for decades, and it definitely means the best kickers from the 1960s can’t compare to the worst kickers of today.

But that’s like saying Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas bring nothing to the conversation about quarterbacking because their completion percentages and interceptions are way different than bottom-tier QBs today.

They play a different style of offense today with rules that help passers and there are just better athletes out there now. But that doesn’t mean that Roger Staubach shouldn’t be included in a discussion about best quarterbacks. By the same token, I argue the best kickers of the 1960s should be compared to the best today by how they compared to the league average of their times.

When I did that for the 32 kickers with the most field goal attempts since 1960, a couple of players jumped out to the top. (Drum roll, please.) Nick Lowery, the German-born kicker who played between 1978 and 1996, mostly with the Chiefs, was way better than the league average. He had 8.07 percentage points of what I call Added Value. He made 80 percent of his kicks in an era when the rest of the league made 72 percent. Lowery was considered an excellent kicker in his time. Nine times he was in the top five for most-accurate kicker for the season.

The No. 2 kicker for AV is Jim Bakken of the St. Louis Cardinals. He made 64 percent of his kicks in a league that made 57 percent. He was a four-time pro-bowler and two-time all-pro. In 1975, they called St. Louis, the Cardiac Cardinals because the team won seven games in the final minutes. They won three games by three points or less. At least two of them came in the final seconds from Bakken. He was 79 percent on FGs in a league that made 64 percent that season.

I did the same analysis for two guys who didn’t meet my 400-attempt minimum. Don Cockroft of the Browns and Justin Tucker of the crows. Cockroft is mostly remembered these days for missing two field goals and two extra points in the infamous “Red right 88” playoff game in January 1981. But he was at the end of a long career in which he was a punter and kicker. He made 66 percent of his 328 field goal attempts in his career. That was 5.6 points better than the league as a whole and helps explain the good reputation he had from those who remember more than 1980.

Tucker is widely viewed as perhaps the best kicker of all time. Through 2021, for example, he made 91 percent of his kicks. That’s just ridiculous, but it also stands out compared to the rest of the league: He’s about 7 points better than everyone else by my measure.

I added these two guys because I think it shows that Tucker is near the top however you cut it. That just makes sense by our own eye test. But the same method puts guys like Fred Cox and Jan Stenerud near the top and puts guys like Matt Prater and Mason Crosby at the bottom. They are talented, but not elite. They kicked in recent times, so their stats are better than someone like Jim Turner. But there’s a reason Jim Turner kicked a long time and was well regarded, and Matt Prater is someone who will probably be forgotten in 20 years.