Why It's Almost Impossible to Kick a 90-Yard Field Goal | WIRED

the field goal might only be worth three points but it's still one of the most essential ways of scoring in American football in 2000 1873 NFL games were decided by three points or fewer more than any other season in league history so the kicker is responsible for making field goals otherwise known as place kickers are under a lot of pressure to perform yeah there's a lot of stress that goes into it you're either the hero or you're the villain a well-placed kick can make or break a game or sometimes even a season and the longer a kickers range the greater the strategic threat they pose the NFL's most lethal place kickers have sent balls flying through the uprights from 40 50 even 60 yards away in 2013 Matt Prater kicked the longest field goal in NFL history when he hit one from 64 yards now look a 64 yard field goal is already a tremendous feat of athleticism but coaches players and sports scientists all agree that it's only a matter of time until someone kicks one even farther potentially a lot farther in practice some players have made field goals from more than 80 yards away but that's without any pads on without a crowd cheering or booing at you and without a defensive line doing everything in its power to block your kick what we wanted to know is what is the absolute physical limit when it comes to the field goal so today we're gonna look at why making a field goal from 90 yards away is almost impossible to find out what it takes I talked with one of the best place kickers on earth I equated to golf or to baseball if things aren't lined up it doesn't matter how strong you are it's not gonna be as good of a kick took a crack at hitting a 25 yarder myself and discuss the elements of a perfect place kick with a bio mechanist we need the ball to launch with a high velocity right angle and be accurate Harrison Becker has mastered all of those elements buckler is the starting kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs and he's known for having one of the most powerful and most consistent kicks in the NFL people don't realize how much work we actually put in just because can't come out and do a lot of kicks in practice or even in the game doesn't mean that there's a lot of stuff we can't do on the side as far as watching film taking care of our body doing mental reps I mean kicking it a lot of it is mental we met up at Kohl's kickin camp in whitewater Wisconsin where he talked me through the finer points of place kicking back to Ford but also from this kind of left-to-right motion from back there all right before we get started here's a summary of what a typical field goal looks like straight there's the snap the hold and the kick all of which take place in about a second so let's say this snap and hold are good now let's look at how to approach the ball you've got me here at the 15-yard line so 15 plus 10 for the end zone this is 25 yards a 5 yard field goal right down the middle I like your confidence in me yeah but you got the soccer shoes army and maybe even follow me and yes I was wearing soccer shoes a lot of professionals actually do that they were a soccer cleat on their kicking foot because it gives them a better feel for the ball and a football cleats on their plant foot to help them get better traction but the truth is no shoe on earth was gonna make up for my terrible form all right so we need to get up the Buckner gave me some tips starting with my foot placement Oh your plant foot you won faced and straight down your target line and then you're gonna want this your kicking foot to be BAM perpendicular I was also using the wrong part of my phone no you're gonna want to have way up there that's what a lot of people don't realize that we're making contact with the ball all the way up there that's the strongest part of your foot right there on that bone looking better high squash the point that's good in high school that would have been good exactly too bad I'm 32 okay finally Buckner gave me some tips on where to stand I had been backing up way behind the ball thinking that a running start would help boost my power but Buckner says that's not always the case the most important thing is your contact so even if you're sprinting up to the ball if your contact isn't perfect then it doesn't matter how much momentum you had because the farther away I get the more opportunity I had to mess up or you know just being consistent really as long as that last steps good you get good contact with the most important important thing but also in a game you have one point three seconds from standing still to making contact with the ball so if you're super far away it's gonna get blocked you know so you kind of have to be closer as well Hey last ball last ball we're out that was great okay so I literally just kind of put together all of the tips that you gave me in the last second there I was next it was buckers turn why don't you show me how this is done here now it's the offseason for Bucer so he wasn't about to blow his leg out showing me up still he made it look effortless not the greatest but it went through and once he had warmed up he made it look just as easy from fifty yards which makes sense he's one of the best kickers on the planet but why is bucer so good to find out I talked to bio mechanist chase Pfeiffer he stops their plant leg too with his picking lay around in 2015 Pfeiffer developed an advanced motion tracking system to help deconstruct the flight of a field goal this help them determine optimum foot speeds impact locations and launch angle now there are three things that really set vipers research apartment number one most studies on kicking have focused on soccer not American football number two most of those studies were performed using two-dimensional analysis Viper's analyses were done in three dimensions which gave him a lot more insight into the dynamics of player's kicks and number three in addition to studying the form of elite place kickers he also built this it's a field goal bot and unlike a human kicker it can kick a football the exact same way every single time humans are unpredictable and a robot anything every time by cross-referencing his player data with his robot data FIFO was able to analyze how things like foot placement foot velocity and overall coordination affect the quality of a given kick the most important variable of all impact location where a player's foot makes contact with the ball his research shows that the key to a monstrous field goal boils down to two things how much force you can deliver to the ball and where you deliver that force Pfeifer says that when an elite place kickers foot makes contact it's usually traveling between 42 and 49 miles per hour and that can deliver more than 3000 Newton's of force to the ball the faster your foot moves the faster the ball leaves the ground and the farther it travels now the ideal launch angle for distance for a projectile as any freshman physics student will tell you is 45 degrees but when you account for drag Pfeifer says the ideal launch angle for a football toppling end-over-end is actually closer to 43 degrees and to kick the ball at that precise angle you need to kick it right here about two and a half inches off the ground or a quarter of the way up the ball kicking the ball on this sweet spot helps achieve the ideal launch angle while minimizing the foot velocity required to maximize distance in other words hitting the ball right here lets you kick it farther easier if you say that's half way and the quarters about right there that's generally where you want to hit it I mean if you hit it a little low it's gonna be a good ball it's just gonna be spinning more but if you hit it too high up that's when you're gonna hit a line drive knuckleball that precise combination of power and foot placement is what enabled Matt Prater to get the longest field goal in NFL history in 2013 when he sent the ball flying through the uprights from 64 yards away now here's the thing place kickers have actually been kicking about that far for almost half a century in 1970 Norlin Saints kicker Tom Dempsey blasted a 63-yard game-winning field goal against the Detroit Lions his record stood for over 40 years and there are a few things that make Dempsey's record remarkable for one he was born without any toes on his kicking foot and was outfitted with this custom shoe well it's unclear if that gave him an unfair advantage the NFL eventually created a rule that standardized kicking cleats the other thing that's incredible Dempsey's record is that since he said it despite improvements in equipment and training almost nobody has been able to outdo him at least not during a game and have the players who have come close most of them were kicking at Mile High Stadium in Denver Colorado where balls fly farther through the thin air Dempsey on the other hand set his record at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans just a few feet above sea level since then nobody but Prater has managed to kick the ball farther during a game but one thing kickers have improved over the years their accuracy for as long as the NFL has been keeping records on field goals place kickers have been hitting their marks more and more consistently from every distance today's NFL kickers are as successful from 50 yards as 1970s kickers were from 30 and a lot of their accuracy has to do with how they kick prior to the 1970s most place kickers would run at the ball head on and kick it with the tips of their shoes it's called a toe kick and while it can be powerful it is also notoriously inaccurate but starting in the late 60s players began making contact with the ball high up on the instep of their kicking foot the way a soccer player would but you have a much more consistent impact with that larger area so the end result there being increased accuracy by the mid 1970s most place kickers had begun to favor the soccer kick over the toe kick and today nobody kicks at their toe at least not in the NFL and that's because when it comes to place kicking at the professional level accuracy matters more than power guys in the NFL don't necessarily have the strongest legs there's a lot of guys in college that have these massive legs that might not make it an NFL because they don't have the accuracy you know so if you want to have a long career you got to be able to be consistent over a long period of time once you're able to kick with power place-kicking is essentially a geometry problem the angle of your kick needs to be steep enough to clear the line of defenders trying to block your kick and it needs to be straight enough to avoid flying too far left or right of the goal posts and the farther from the field goal you get the smaller your margin of error becomes a 20-yard field goal has to stay within a seventeen and a half degree window to count but from sixty yards that window shrinks to just under six degrees so you're hitting a 60 yard field goal if that things slowly tilling to the right you might miss that but if it was an extra point that would be good if that was a 40-yarder that would have been good so you just have to be a lot more accurate you might be wondering how these guys handle that kind of pressure the answer actually pretty well which might be what sets pros apart from the non professionals as soon as I started jogging on that field I completely forget about everything I ideally I don't even hear the crowd noise and I'm just focusing on what I can control and there's research showing that the key to success at that level is to replicate gametime pressure during practice even if it's just in your head what I like to do in practice is I say okay I've I have three or four balls I'm going to hit from these spots I run on I mentally almost try to envision that there's a crowd there I try to put some pressure on it and then also quality over quantity so let's say a place kicker comes along with unprecedented power and accuracy how far could they realistically kick and how precise would they need to be for their kick to count it turns out the answer to both of those questions is pretty straightforward according to Pfeiffer's calculations a record-breaking 70 yard field goal kick at sea level without wind would require a foot speed of around 49 miles per hour delivered directly to the ball sweet spot and an 80 yarder will take a foot speed of around 56 miles per hour and both of those speeds are well within the realm of current human ability in fact the foot velocities of elite soccer players have been clocked at more than 60 miles per hour which in theory is good enough for a 90-yard field goal now it's true soccer players have a few distinct advantages over place kickers when it comes to kicking the ball far number one they're not outfitted in full pads which can really slow down your foot velocity number two they're not trying to clear a wall of gigantic humans who can use their hands to block your kick and number three unless they're kicking a penalty kick they're typically not performing in the same sorts of high-stakes all-or-nothing scenarios that place kickers are and yet place kickers are definitely capable of record shattering distances today check out this footage of bucker blasting a 90-yard 4.4 second came time to kick off but of course kickoffs don't need to be as accurate so then the challenge becomes placing that kind of kick between the uprights while under the pressure and constraints typical of a field goal remember how the margin for error shrinks the further away you get well from 90 yards the window of your lateral angle shrinks to just 3.9 degrees is it improbable yes impractical absolutely in fact it's hard to even conceive of a gametime scenario in which any coach would even think to attempt a field goal for more than 70 yards away instead of going for say a Hail Mary not that it hasn't happened in 2008 while playing for the Oakland Raiders kicker Sebastian Janikowski was called on to attempt a field goal from 76 yards the farthest attempt in NFL history we couldn't actually afford to pay the NFL for the footage of that kick but just take our word for it it came up short the point is all of the factors are there for somebody to come along and kick a precedent shattering field goal I would not be surprised that at some point in my day I saw somebody kick a upper-80s maybe even 90 I think they could do 85 I mean guys are doing up to 90 yard kickoffs so why couldn't you do an 85 yard field goal you know yeah I definitely think 85 you could do if you had a really stiff back when was a sunny warm day you had a nice ball you had tall grass I mean everything was perfect the kt5 you could do but until all those things line up remember that what players like Harrison Bucer are doing today is already almost impossible [Applause] [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 6,094,628

Keywords: football, kick, harrison butker, football kick, extra point, field goal, how to kick a field goal, 50 yard field goal, 60 yard field goal, 90 yard field goal, longest field goal, longest field goal possible, nfl, harrison butker chiefs, chiefs kicker, nfl player, nfl kicker, place kicker, placekicker, extra point kick, nfl kick, place kick, long field goal, almost impossible, wired almost impossible, almost impossible field goal, wired almost impossible field goal, wired

Id: t0zBnMjxDLg

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Scaryclouds]

I doubt we will see anything more than 75 yards. Just at the end, as the host was saying, biggest problem would be a scenario in which a coach would even attempt it.

I think the Sebass attempt was just before halftime and the danger with that is the run back possibility.

For the desperation, end of game scenario, hail-mary, with the possibility of DPI/other defensive penalty just seems like a better option.

[u/Kniles]

I wish they would have brought up the punt fair catch rule where you can attempt a field goal at the line of scrimmage with no defense trying to block it. This, at the end of a half, seems like the only scenario where someone would ever attempt 80+ yards.

[u/mog44net]

Fun watch

[u/CapnEmaw]

Back in the 90s, Martin Grammatica used to routinely put kickoffs through the uprights while at KSU. I don't remember where the kickoff was from back then, but if we say it was the 35 that would be a 75 yard field goal. Given that it is much easier to kick the ball of the tee with no one rushing you it seems like there would have to be some kind of huge technique improvement to make a field goal longer than that.

[u/[deleted]]

Super interesting, if a little disordered and sensational. Thanks for sharing!

[u/redviper237]

Great video thanks for the post

[u/noslowerdna]

Wow, incredible leg blur.