I’ve always thought of kicking as an outlier in the game of football. While downs one through three showcase bone-crushing tackles, acrobatic catches, and highlight-reel runs, kicking feels like it wandered in from a soccer match down the street, accidentally imported from overseas under a mistaken interpretation of the word “football.”
Few young PeeWee football players have dreams of being the next great kicker. In my youth football days, kicker was such a hard position to fill that the two-point conversion was the standard league-wide and a field goal kick was a trick play.
And yet, a kicker is the highest scoring player in the sport, and 49 of the 50 highest scoring players in NFL history (!) did so on the strength of their leg. 49ers legend Jerry Rice checks in at 43rd on the list with 1,256 career points, a mere 1,417 points away from all-time points leader Adam Vinatieri. 473 field goals separate Vinatieri from the highest-scoring non-kicker in NFL history.
It is a real life Tortoise and the Hare race, and the kicker tortoise has dramatically picked up its pace over the past 20 years. Since 2000, the league-average field goal percentage has climbed from 79% to 85% in 2024 while kickers routinely expand their range to include more difficult kicks than kickers in 2000 ever considered.
We are in the midst of a kicking golden age where the best kicker appears to be automatic from as deep as 60 yards out and a good bet up to 70 if needed (the Cowboys’ Brandon Aubrey, a former Notre Dame soccer player) and every kicker is expected to make 50+ yard kicks. In 2000, the longest made field goal was 55 yarder. In 2024, 28 — twenty-eight! — different kickers made a field goal as long as or longer than that.
NFL teams have adjusted their strategies to take advantage of this kicking boom, attempting more 50+ yard field goals than ever before and 3.7 times their 2000 rate.
Kickers are paying off their coaches’ faith by making those long-range kicks at higher rates than ever.
This golden age has forced coaches to be creative as they try to “win” the kicking battle. The most popular method for buying real estate in opposing kickers minds? Icing the kicker. Simply put, icing the kicker is when an opposing coach calls a timeout before an important kick — here, defined as kicks attempted in the last 2 minutes of the 1st half, the last 2 minutes of the 2nd half of a close game, or any time in overtime.
Coaches hope the extra time provides the opposing kicker more time to think about how the kick can go awry, thus causing them to fall victim to the pressure of the moment and their kick to fall short, wide left, or wide right.
While other aspects of football have undergone huge change, icing the kicker is one of few seemingly untouched areas of the game. Since 2000, icing frequency has held steady at around at around 36% of ice-able attempts, albeit with some variation year-over-year.
This stability remains despite proven success. The added stress of critical moments has a clear impact on the kicker, as NFL-wide FG make percentages are lower on critical kicks than non-critical kicks (see the red and blue lines on the below graph). In these critical moments, iced kicks routinely have lower success than non-iced kicks.
Indeed, at least a 3% dip in field goal make percentage can be observed across situations when kickers are iced vs. not iced. This means that in most end-of-game icing situations, calling a timeout could represent a direct 3% lift in win probability!
A similar dip can be observed across distances, yet coaches fail to test the limits of how much they should ice opposing kickers, calling a time out on only roughly a third of ice-able situations.
This may be due to coaches’ desire for true unpredictability, hoping to keep kickers guessing to the greatest extent. However, more frequent icing is not correlated with decreased effectiveness. In fact, there’s a slight positive impact of more frequent icing on its effectiveness.
Nevertheless, some coaches get unlucky: Nick Sirianni, Kyle Shanahan, and Kevin O’Connell are all frequent icers, but the Eagles, 49ers, and Vikings, respectively, have not seen their efforts pay off.
Cleveland’s Kevin Stefanski leads the league in icing frequency, essentially flipping a coin in every critical moment for whether to call a timeout or not. His aggressiveness has made the Browns a much harder team to beat, with a FG miss rate in ice-able situations nearly 8% higher than league average (and 12% higher than kickers average in non-ice-able situations).
Meanwhile, the Cardinals’ Jonathan Gannon bears the unfortunate crown of never successfully icing a kick. His lack of luck has led to the most conservative approach to icing in the entire NFL, icing the opposing kicker just 20% of the time.
In all, 26 of the the NFL’s 32 coaches have a positive career ROI on icing the kicker compared to if they had done nothing at all. As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you — that goes for timeouts, and coaches would be wise to not go home with extra in their pockets.
Icing does not affect every kicker in the same way. The “clutch gene” is indeed a rare one. Of the current kicker population (excluding those with fewer than five ice-able kicks in their careers), only ten are better when iced than not iced in critical moments – the truly clutch players, an elite group that leaves out some of the greatest field-goal kickers of all time.
Harrison Butker, although the NFL’s all-time field goal percentage leader (narrowly over Aubrey), regresses to a mere league-average mark in critical situations and is another 15 percent worse when iced. Remarkably, his success rate when iced is lower than the worst kicker in the NFL’s average.
Other top kickers struggle when iced to similar extents, with the Panthers’ Eddie Pineiro, the Texans’ Ka’imi Fairbairn, the Raiders’ Daniel Carlson, and the Seahawks’ Jason Myers rounding out the group of top-10 kickers whose field goal percentages drop by more than 9 percentage points when iced compared to their performance in non-iced critical situations.
Brandon Aubrey and Justin Tucker are the two outliers at the top, kickers who do better when opposing coaches give them more time to consider the magnitude of the potential game-winning kick they are about to attempt. Coaches should think twice before attempting to ice this unflappable duo.
Recently, the Commanders swapped kickers, replacing the second worst kicker in the league, Zane Gonzalez, with Matt Gay, who seems to possess as much of the “clutch gene” as anyone. Gay’s career critical situation FG percentage — both when iced and not iced — is on par with the league’s best. In signing Gay to the largest single-year guaranteed money deal in NFL history for a kicker, Washington is betting on bringing his clutch performances to the nation’s capital even though his field goal percentage in non-critical situations falls below league-average marks.
As coaches find themselves in tricky end-of-game situations, they are left to confront a now-familiar dilemma: To Ice or Not To Ice. Despite the kicking revolution transforming 55-yard attempts from rarities to routine, this psychological gambit remains unchanged. Coaches watch the backs of opposing kickers’ helmets, hoping they aren’t the hare watching hopelessly as the tortoise wins again. Calling a timeout may be their only hope — tortoises don’t like the cold.
Data source: NFL play-by-play data, 2000-2024 seasons (scraped using NFLFastR)