What’s Jeff Heath up to these days? The Dallas Cowboys‘ kicker problem is significant. It seems the only viable solution at the moment would be for the Cowboys to simply decide not to kick field goals or extra points. The last time we saw Brett Maher, he had the full-blown [redacted].
It’s unfortunate because Maher was rock solid all season. He went 29 of 32 in the regular season, hitting all 14 kicks from inside 40 yards, a 60-plus-yard field goal, and was 14 of 17 from 40-59 yards. But few things in life are more fickle than kicking.
In the Cowboys’ Week 18 loss to Washington, Maher missed an extra point, and it was all over. He’d go on to miss five of his eight postseason kicks, including a 1 for 6 mark on extra points.
Dallas Cowboys Kicker Options
Recently, Cowboys special teams coordinator John Fassel put up the Bat signal.
“We have Tristan [Vizcaino] on the roster. Anybody else on Earth who is not on the team right now, is under consideration,” he said, via the Cowboys’ website. “That’s everyone really. I think we have a lot of different guys that we’re still looking at — XFL, USFL, veterans on the street, younger guys who still haven’t found their way.”
Vizcaino has missed only one of his 12 field-goal attempts since first latching onto a roster in 2020. However, he only has 12 attempts over the past three seasons and has been on four different rosters. Vizcaino’s never attempted a kick over 50 yards in an NFL game, and he went just 10 of 15 on extra points in 2021 for the Chargers.
He didn’t attempt a field goal for the Washington Huskies until his final season, and he made just 12 of his 19 attempts.
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Mason Crosby, Ryan Succop, Robbie Gould, Randy Bullock, and yes, even Maher could all be Cowboys by the time training camp rolls around. Those veterans all have a far more extensive track record than Vizcaino.
One must also remember that Maher wasn’t on the Cowboys’ roster until training camp a season ago, when it was clear that Jonathan Garibay would not be Dallas’ answer at the position.
Dallas went into the NFL Draft looking at the position, but in the end, didn’t come away with a new kicker.
“Obviously, we want to come up with the best solution that we can there, but we didn’t get the kicker opportunity that we thought we might get in the draft,” Jerry Jones told reporters after the NFL Draft. “And we had other priorities when we had a chance to get it. We took somebody else, obviously.”
But maybe the Cowboys can parlay this into making more aggressive and more correct decisions surrounding two-point conversions and fourth downs.
Go for 2 and Fourth Downs More, Cow(ards)boys
From 2000-2014, NFL teams went for two 997 times and converted on 48.2% of those attempts. Kickers made 95.2% of extra points during that time when the kick was even more “automatic.”
But here’s the thing that basketball has figured out, and football has failed to implement. More points scored less often are still sometimes better. A team must shoot 60% from inside the three-point line to score the same amount of points shooting 40% from behind the arc will bring.
That means we can multiply 48.2 by those two points scored to better compare the outcome to kicking extra points. That’s .964 points compared to the kicker’s .952.
And those outcomes are from before the league moved the ball back to the 15-yard line for extra points. Until we abolish kickers completely, teams will likely only go for two when their analytical teams are holding them at calculator-point. Luckily, the nerds over at FiveThirtyEight did the math for us back in 2019 to make things easy.
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Not unlike extra points, teams around the league, including the Cowboys, should be more aggressive on fourth downs. Fear and tradition grip coaches when it comes to making either of these decisions, but the numbers are quite clear.
Scoring a touchdown is worth more points than kicking a field goal. But when we add the value of possession and field position into the mix, the margins go from seven versus three to six versus two. Taking things back to basketball, that’s the difference between hitting a three and making a free throw.