With almost unbelievable accuracy, the kickers who'll play on Sunday are the best quartet that's ever combined to play in the two conference championship games. Which will rise above and finish as the weekend's top scorer?
I’m not going to spend too much time on the kickers, because I don’t think you guys care. But I do give these guys the same due diligence as the guys at the other positions. I look into it, and I report back with my findings.
KICKERS:
To me, all of them look pretty good. They are all plenty accurate. They can hit pressure kicks and long kicks. All of them have converted over 90 percent of their field goals (and without even looking it up, I’m sure that’s an NFL first). Gostkowski is 38-41. With one more game than the others, Dawson is 38-42, and he had a miss from 71 yards (should we even count that?). Hauschka is 36-38. And Prater is 26-28, including an NFL-record 64-yarder. They all scored at least 140 points in the regular season. Pretty remarkable stuff.
Weather won’t affect either of these games. With the weather in Denver, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see an attempt from 50-plus.
In the regular reason, Stephen Gostkowski was the No. 1 guy, scoring 158 points. Not much difference between the others – all in the range of 140-150.
If you want to try to ride the guy with the hot hand (foot?), then it’s Phil Dawson. He’s scored double-digit points seven games in a row. I will try to pick through the numbers later in the week and figure out if anybody’s ever done that before.
If you want to take the safe points, than probably Matt Prater. He kicked 75 extra points in the regular season – 31 more than any of the other three guys (who all had 44). But Prater has kicked only 26 field goals, 10 fewer than any of the others. The Broncos have been the best at scoring touchdowns rather than settling for three.
If you want to focus on defenses rather than offenses, then Stephen Hauschka is the guy to avoid. The 49ers allowed only 88 kicking points in the regular season, compared to 95 for Seattle, 104 for New England and 113 for Denver.
If you stick the offensive and defensive numbers in the meat grinder and average them out, it tells us the order will be Patriots-Broncos-49ers-Seahawks. New England’s offense (and Denver’s defense) combined for 271 points in 32 regular season game, or 8.5 points per game. Denver’s offense works out to 7.9. San Francisco grades out at 7.3 and Seattle is just behind, at 7.2
I find comfort in working with teams I believe will win. Winning teams, we know, tend to score more points. Over the last 10 years, teams with winning records have averaged 122 kicking points per season (7.6 per game), while teams with losing records have averaged only 101 per season (6.3).
All of these teams, of course, have winning records. But given that we’re in a zero-sum situation, those win-loss records need to be adjusted. San Francisco went 12-4 in the regular season, but it’s more of 6-10 or 7-9 type team on Sunday. (If they played this game 16 times, Seattle probably would win 9-10 of them). New England can probably be treated as more of a 6-10 type team this week, though I’ll give it a little credit for the likelihood that it might outscore both of the NFC teams. Also note that while Seattle and Denver both went 13-3 in the regular season, they’re more like 9-7 or 10-6 teams this week, given the situations there in.
But enough playing around with the numbers and theories. Ultimately, you’ve got to put the four names in order and hope you get it right.
| Kicker Rankings | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Prater | |
| 2. | Gostkowski | |
| 3. | Hauschka | |
| 4. | Dawson | |
--Ian Allan