‘We may see a 70-yarder’: NFL kickers are excelling. How much better can they get?

In the first 70 years of its existence, the NFL saw two successful field goals struck from 60-plus yards.

Brandon Aubrey, the Dallas Cowboys kicker, has already hit two this season alone.

Aubrey, a former professional soccer player once drafted by MLS’s Toronto FC, equalled a franchise record when he converted from 65 yards against the Baltimore Ravens last month. His effort, which sailed between the uprights with several feet to spare, was just one yard shy of the all-time NFL record by Justin Tucker, his opposite number on the day, set in 2021. Aubrey knocked another one through from 51 yards later the same game.

Related: Brilliant but beaten: the historic, searing misfortune of Joe Burrow

And Aubrey isn’t the only NFL kicker starring in the early weeks of the new season. In Week 4, the New England Patriots’ Joey Slye hit one from 63 yards. Across the first two weeks of the season, there were 39 field goals attempted from 50-plus yards. Only four missed. That success rate of 89.7% was the highest through the first two weeks of a campaign since 2008, when only 11 field goals of 50-plus yards were attempted. As it stands through Week 5, not accounting for the Monday night game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the New Orleans Saints, the overall league-wide field goal success rate of 86.3% is the second-highest average in NFL history.

So what is behind this recent boom?

John Carney, a Super Bowl-champion kicker with the New Orleans Saints who now runs Carney Coaching, thinks technological advancements have played a key role.

“We have this little guy,” he says, raising his iPhone. “That’s very beneficial. Anybody can go out on the field, set this up and get some really good video to troubleshoot. Maybe their contact is off. Maybe their swing path is off. They can troubleshoot very quickly.

“In the past, very rarely did I have anyone available to record me. And if I did, it was a camcorder, VHS. Then you had to go back and plug that into a TV. The quality wasn’t very good. You might be missing the frame of the foot hitting the ball that you needed to fine-tune your contact.

“And there’s more quality coaching available now than there was in the past. More former players and specials teams coaches from the NFL have made themselves available to coach punting and kicking at the high school and college levels. That has been a great feeder system to make sure young kickers are getting the proper mechanics, proper instruction … Guys aren’t forced to go to a field with a bag of balls and figure it out for themselves.”

There is also the element of trust. As kickers have demonstrated their ability to convert at high percentages over increasing distances, coaches are more willing to lean into long-range field goals as a means of getting points on the board.

“There were a handful of kickers 10 years ago who could kick the ball the same distance,” says Stephen Hauschka, who won Super Bowl XLVIII with the Seattle Seahawks and set an NFL record for the most consecutive field goals made from 50-plus yards. “But we’re seeing two things now: coaches are willing to go for these kicks, and then the kickers are proving themselves.

“The bar has been raised. It’s like the four-minute mile. Once it was broken, a bunch of people broke it. It’s the same thing in kicking. Coaches are seeing it’s possible to make kicks from 55-plus, and they’re doing it and getting rewarded for it.

“The kicker has got to be one of the five most important positions in the game. A good kicker can win you a handful of games a season. When you see a guy like Brandon Aubrey raising the bar and redefining what’s possible out there, and the Cowboys are trusting him in that, I see the value of a kicker increasing.”

Carney agrees. “I think the mindset of coaches has changed – ‘We have a very talented place kicker on our team; let him have that opportunity,’” he says.

Improvements in practice, athleticism and technology show up in place kicking. With year-on-year rule changes, upgraded equipment and a keener focus on player welfare, the NFL of today is barely recognisable from the grainy footage of early gridiron; comparing, say, the wide receivers or quarterbacks of 2024 with their counterparts from 50 years ago is a pointless exercise, so vastly has football changed.

But the task of a kicker in today’s NFL, in approach and optics, is barely distinguishable from kicking in decades past – at least since the goalposts were moved from the goalline to the endline in 1974. And amid the jargon-filled world of modern analytics, field goal distances and success rates are as easily digestible as any sporting metric you can find.

“Just like we saw all these world records broken this year at the summer Olympics, it’s going to happen again because of the advancements in coaching, training methods, technology and sports science,” Carney says. “It helps athletes improve at a light-speed level.”

But Hauschka preaches caution to those getting giddy over the early season statistics. Experience taught him that as the year wears on, the kicker’s job gets harder. He expects, at least to some degree, a regression by the time winter rolls around.

“It’s early in the season,” Hauschka adds. “The weather is good. Guys’ legs are fresh, their minds are fresh. It’s towards the end of the season when things get more difficult.”

Still, there is little doubt that kicking in the NFL has progressed over the past decade or so to a level that would have been unimaginable in decades past. So how much further – literally and figuratively – can NFL kickers go?

“The Cowboys kick in a dome, so that’s something they can do all year round,” Hauschka says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the record [for longest field goal] broken this year.”

Carney, who worked with Aubrey early in his transition from soccer to place kicking, also expects records to fall in the near future.

“He’s an amazing talent,” he says of the Dallas kicker. “What he is doing is incredible. He may end up as the greatest kicker in NFL history the way he’s going. There are some great legs out there. I’m excited to see who steps up and shatters that … record. It’s exciting for the fans and it’s great for the game.

“You want to see Babe Ruth hit that record-breaking home run. We may see a 70-yarder this year.”