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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thirteen Below" data-source="post: 1030767" data-attributes="member: 18006">The thing that troubles me is that there also seems to be no pattern to his misses. With a lot of young kickers, you can see a tendency in the way they miss - they tend to hook it left, or slice it right, or shank it, or whatever, but they usually make the same mistake more often than not.But my impression is that Carlson doesn't do that. He just... misses. Misses whatever, misses whenever. Misses left, misses right, misses short... long kicks, short kicks... he's perfect from 20-39 yards, but misses over half his kicks over 40 yards, as well as 5 extra points.And I don't know how much more we can expect of him, because I've never understood what the heck he's doing here in the first place. Obviously the experts see something in him that I'm not seeing, and I do defer to their experience and judgment - but a year into the Carlson thing, I'm having a hard time seeing just exactly what it is they saw. In his senior year, he ranked 85th in accuracy among all NCAA 116 placekickers - with an accuracy rate of 70.6%. To be fair, college success is not always an accurate indicator of a future accurate NFL kicker. Kansas City's Harrison Butker went 71.7% at Georgia Tech, and his 7-year NFL career field goal percentage is 89.1%. And KC seems quite pleased with him.Seattle's Jason Myers went 63.2% at Marist (whatever the hell a Marist is), and has a lifetime percentage of 83.3% - including a perfect season in 2020. He was a UFA too, but a walk-on. In fact, he worked as a parking valet in Los Angeles for 3 years after graduating, working on his kicking technique constantly, before finally showing up at a tryout camp that Jacksonville held at the Senior Bowl in 2015. He made an impression, and hit 86.7% his roookie season with Jax.Both of these guys entered the NFL with some huge question marks about what they were doing there, but at some point, something "clicked", and it all came together.But there's another example who may more closely match Carlson at this stage...One of the true all-time greats, Robbie Gould, hit 63.9 percent at Penn State, and 3 of his 4 seasons were 60% or lower. He was an undrafted free agent in the Patriots' camp in 2005; they shooed him away and he knocked on Baltimore's door. They sent him on his way after a couple of weeks, and finally Chicago gave him a try when their kicker went down in Week 3. He finished 2005 with Chicago, and honestly had an even worse rookie season than Carlson (77.8%), but they brought him back in 06 and he freakin' rocked - 88.9%.And he never looked back. He retired last year, ending up 10th all-time in scoring and 8th in field goal percentage - 86.9%.If you look at Gould's college career and first season in the NFL and compare it to Carlson's equivalent stats, Gould looked even worse, but somewhere along the way someone looked at him and said, "this kid is close, if he can just work out one or two things" - and for whatever reasons, they turned out to be right.And maybe it's that way with Carlson, as well. Maybe 2024 is the season he bangs 88.9%, too. But I'm just not sure what Green Bay saw in his college career that made them think he was an NFL guy.In college, he was 25 out of 39 between 40-49 yards (64%), and 5 for 17 over 50 yards (29%). All the scouting reports say he had a short leg, couldn't be counted on over 40 yards, soft and weak kickoffs - 42% of his kickoffs were returned by the other team, which plonked him at #99 out of 116, and he had too many kicks blocked because he was slow in his technique and couldn't get the ball off before the D-line was 2 feet off the ground with their hands in the air. And his weak leg made it less likely that his trajectory would be high enough to get the ball above the blockers.So yeah, maybe he will do a Robbie Gould and make a huge turnaround. Objectively, Mason Crosby got off to a worse start than Carlson, and it really took a couple-few years before he settled in. Statistically, Carlson did much better this year than Crosby did for at least a couple of years, except that Carlson seems to pick the most crucially awful moments to **** up. So in comparison, maybe he seems even more bad than Mason.So yeah, maybe Carlson will work through it too. And I'm perfectly OK with giving him a shot at showing us that in 24.Just still scratching my head trying to figure out what was so special that we drafted him in the first place, other than  that Bisaccio spoke out strongly for him because he worked with his older brother and was impressed. And there really is some degree of validity to that; drafting a kicker to develop in the future involves a number of intangibles, some of which involve things like character, personality, core values. etc. I get that, and don't necessarily fault it. But I just hope that Bisaccio saw a few more measurable, tangible qualities beyond "his brother really rocked".I guess this is the year we find out.Carlson seems like a great kid. I hope he settles into a better groove this season with a year's experience under his belt, and some more focused coaching. I'm pulling for him. I'm just puzzled over how he even wound up here, and haven't seen any measurable answers so far.</blockquote>

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