Your football team is down by 2 or 1, or maybe even tied; there isn’t enough time on the clock to score a touchdown. As you look down your sideline you see your kicker warming up his game-winning kick over and over again into his personal kicking net. Time keeps winding down and you realize the fate of winning lies on the foot of your kicker.
Every team must have a kicker for special game time scenarios that can help, or in some cases, hurt the team. Every position on the team is vital and therefore a mistake done by any member can hurt the team and result in a loss.2 The reason this is being presented , is because most football programs do not focus on recruiting a kicker. Kickers are usually walk-ons on the team, which in result, the walk-on kicker isn’t the best kicker the team could of acquired. Due to poor recruiting of kickers at the collegiate level, many good kickers go unnoticed. I am not by any means putting down walk-on kickers because I have seen some very successful ones. However, if a coach wants to make sure to get a kicker he can trust, the coach must go out and search for one he likes and has seen kick.
So why don’t football programs just put a bit more effort into recruiting good kickers for their team and apply a scholarship for them. A scholarship athlete entitles the coach to ask more of him/her, therefore the athlete gives better effort and puts in the work required to get better. Often times coaches want to hold on to that scholarship for a different position for many reasons, but if you go back to see the teams that win close games they had a kicker that was on scholarship. I agree that every player must earn the scholarship given to him/her but a kicker proves himself the same way any other player does- stats. But recruiters often oversee specialist because it’s a position that isn’t “important”, until of course you need to win a game in the last seconds. Many may not think a good kicker can make a difference- well then, just hope your team isn’t down and needing a field goal to win, and the kicker misses. A good kicker capitalizes and well, maybe that one scholarship was worth it.1
Kickers and punters are definitely the most under appreciated positions in football. When a team has players that are really good at those positions they can make huge impacts on the game. I never knew that kickers were so under recruited; the teams that do look hard for kickers are usually very good on special teams and have good records overall.
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