NFL Kickers better than ever
If this trend continues I can see talk of narrowing the goal posts start.
There was talk of narrowing the goal posts back in 2015 when the league experimented with it at the Pro Bowl that year.
Excerpts from a 1/20/15 article by Josh Weinfuss, ESPN Staff Writer, as viewed at www.espn.com
NFL tries smaller posts, longer PATs
Adam Vinatieri and
Cody Parkey won't have as easy of a Pro Bowl as they were expecting.
The NFL is narrowing the goalposts for Sunday's game, moving them from 18.6 feet wide to 14 feet wide, NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent said at a Pro Bowl news conference Tuesday at the Arizona Biltmore.
And as the league did early in the preseason, extra points will be moved back to the 15-yard-line, making them 33.5-yard attempts, Vincent added.
"It'll allow us to see exactly how skilled the kicker position has actually become," Vincent said.
Kickers made 83.9 percent of all field goals in 2014 -- including 77.4 percent from 40 to 49 yards and 61 percent of field goals 50 yards or longer -- and 99.3 percent of extra points.
The NFL experimented with moving extra points back to the 15-yard line during the first two preseason games of 2014 and the results didn't change much -- only eight PATs were missed in 141 attempts (94.3 percent). By comparison, only eight extra points out of 1,230 attempts were missed during the 2014 regular season.
Full Article In Link Below:
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id...er-goal-posts-longer-kicks-pats-2015-pro-bowlThen this...Excerpts from a 1/26/15 Staff article Around The NFL as viewed at
www.nfl.com
Adam Vinatieri not 'happy' with narrower goal posts
Adam Vinatieri handled the circumstances with grace on Sunday, but beneath the veteran kicker's gentle facade stood a player who couldn't help but wonder if his position group was getting picked on a bit.
Specifically, Vinatieri wondered how significant the league's average field goal percentage would dip with the narrowed uprights that the NFL experimented with on Sunday.
Vinatieri missed a pair of 35-yard extra points, and a 38-yard field goal after having fewer than five attempts on the new posts before Sunday.
"Ask a receiver, can we take his gloves off because he's catching the ball too well?" Vinatieri said on the field following Team Irvin's
32-28 victory. "Nobody is going to be overly happy about that. But I understand the wheels of change are in motion and people want to change stuff, but I feel bad for the young bucks that will have to deal with it their whole career."
Vinatieri said that a change could make kickers more valuable, but that it will also alter the way a team operates inside their opponent's 40-yard line.
"Yeah, I mean obviously," he said. "I don't know, there was an 83 or 84 percent field goal accuracy this past year, I think this would knock it down to ... I don't know. I do know one thing, I doubt there would be as many 50-yarders attempted because the percentage would go way down."
But on the flip side, how much more exciting does it make a game when the odds of an extra point decrease so significantly? How much better does a matchup become when field goals decrease by 10 percent in reliability?
Full Article In Link Below:
https://www.nfl.com/news/adam-vinatieri-not-happy-with-narrower-goal-posts-0ap3000000463393
And this from the company website at:
https://simplekicking.com/sk-pro-posts/
Call them skinny field goal posts, narrow uprights, thinner goal posts, or arena uprights. The Pro-Posts are a second set of uprights (9 feet) attached to the inside of the standard-width uprights (18 feet 6 inches.) It narrows the space that a kicker can make a kick for practice. Kickers who aim small on Pro-Posts, miss small in games.
Since 2002, the most common margin of victory in the NFL has been 3 points with 418 games out of 2,668 games. This is equivalent to 15.67% of games finishing with a 3 point difference between the winner and loser at the end of the game (sporting charts).
Pro-Posts create a narrower channel, forcing kickers to concentrate on kicking through a much more difficult target. Kickers have to make more accurate kicks in practice, which translates to more points in games. Combined with the Simple Kicking App, kickers significantly increase the chances of winning more games.
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IIRC, Morten Anderson began practicing on narrow uprights. Garrett Hartley did as well. I haven't seen anything about Saints recent kicker Will Lutz or current kicker Blake Grupe doing so, but it appears to have been a common practice around the league over the past 25 years or so.
Narrowing the goal posts for NFL kickers would change the game in a number of ways. First, the accuracy of FGs, especially at longer distances, would decrease significantly. Secondly, there would be more routine misses of extra point attempts. Coaches would have to reconsider either going for it or punting more often in situations that are now standard practice to attempt a FG.