Most NFL fans know that the record for the longest field goal was set by Tom Dempsey in 1970, and that this has subsequently been matched by Jason Elam (1998), Sebastian Janikowski (2011) and David Akers (2012).
My question is: how many field goals of more than 63 yards have been attempted?
I was there when Mason Crosby attempted the fair catch kick Fair catch kick - Wikipedia at the Packers - Lions Game in 2008.
It was a 69 yard attempt. Unlike his recent kicks, it was straight down the middle. Unfortunately it was a few yards short.
Brian
Why so long before the record was broken? You’d figure given enough attempts, there would be more distance records.
I would figure if a team had a comfortable (15+) point lead late in the game, they wouldnt have much to lose by attempting a long field goal instead of punting.
Missing a long field goal tends to give your opponent good field position. I’m guessing that most really long attempts come very close to the end of a half.
Janikowski attempted a 76 yard FG. It fell well short.
There are plenty of kickers with more than enough leg and accuracy to put it through the uprights from 70+ yards, and can do so with relative ease during practice. However, in-game they have to get the ball over the defense who is trying to stop them.
A kid in Washington (state) kicked a 67-yarder a couple of months ago (the high school record is 68, set in 1985). You can see the defense gets zero push and the ball seems pretty low going over the players at the line of scrimmage. A good kick, but no way does that ball makes it past NFL players.
Back in the Seventies and Eighties, the old Southwestern Conference of college football had a LOT of excellent kickers (barefoot Tony Franklin and Texas’ Jeff Ward come to mind) , and teams used to go for extremely long field goals all the time
That stopped when the rules were changed. Previously, if a Tony Franklin missed a 62 yard field goal, the other team got the ball at the 20 yard line. After the rule change, if you missed a 62 yard field goal, the other team got the ball at the line of scrimmage- that is, the 45 yard line.
It’s dangerous to give the other team the ball with that kind of field posiiton, so now, teams only try really long field goals when they’re sure it’s the last play of the half.
That’s been my observation. Otherwise it’s very risky because of the field position considerations.
Between accusations of being unsporting, the more important strategic need to run down the clock, the fact that you give the other team good field position if you try a very long kick and miss, this just isn’t going to happen much (or ever). So you only see these kinds of kicks attempted at or near the end of a half or a game and if a team has a ton of confidence in its kicker.
In the NFL, the defense gets the ball at the spot of the kick. When you miss a 60+ yard field goal (as you’re likely to do), your opponent gets the ball on the wrong side of the 50 yard line.
Even in Canadian football, which doesn’t have the field position considerations (a missed field goal is like a punt), the record is 62 yards. It’s hard to kick a football further than 60 yards through a set of uprights.
Not quite, but it’d be close to midfield. If the offense misses a 67-yard kick, the other team would get the ball on the 50.
The NFL rule is now that the ball is spotted at the point of the kick, not the former line of scrimmage. Also, spots are more often 8 yards back now, not 7. So, a missed 68-yarder gives up the ball at your own 42.
It won’t be attempted unless it’s the last play of the game. It wouldn’t be tried at the end of the first half because a bad snap could result in the defense recovering the ball and scoring a touchdown. So a team has to be down by 3 points or less, stuck in their own territory, with a only a few seconds to play. One other circumstance, also unlikely, is the fair-catch free-kick as pointed out by N9IWP. With a free kick the ball is kicked from the line of scrimmage without any rushing, so modern kickers would have a decent chance, but the opportunity doesn’t come up very often. The opposing team would have to have punted from near their own goal line with only a few seconds left in the game for that to occur.
ETA: Although the kickers weren’t as good then, the rules used to allow multiple attempts at a field goal. A team could have used all 4 downs attempting field goals. That would have created more attempts, except those distances were well out of range for the kickers in those days.
Akers, Elam and Janikowski all made their 63-yard kicks at the end of the first half.
Sorry, I should have said it shouldn’t be attempted. It’s a damn fool move. I’ll stop now before I start ranting about Bill Belichick.
The defense can also return a missed kick for a score - the longest play in NFL history is (I think - at the very least it once was) Antonio Cromartie’s TD return off a missed FG. Between that and field position, there’s pretty good reason for a team with a 2 or 3 score lead to punt rather than try a long kick. Long FGs are more often used by trailing teams as desperation plays - they’re a lot more likely to go wrong than right, so you don’t do it unless you really have to.
(Former placekicker here. 
)
That’s mostly the case on long field goal attempts, ironically enough. Attempts from inside of about 45 yards are still usually made with a 7-yard placement.
On a long field goal, the holder sets up 8 yards behind the line of scrimmage, because the kicker will be attempting to hit the ball with a lower trajectory (sacrificing height for distance); the extra yard is there to give the ball a little better chance to clear the defenders who are trying to block the kick.
Another factor which has made it more difficult to break the 63-yard record is the “K-ball”. Kickers are far more accurate, with (on the whole) stronger legs, than they were 30 or 40 years ago. In addition, the balls which were used in games had often been “broken in” a bit, usually by the kickers – no one who handles a football likes the shininess and slickness of a brand-new ball, but the kickers and punters especially liked to break in the ball a bit, because doing so makes a football just a little bit rounder and softer (both of which make the ball easier to kick). This “breaking in” didn’t just consist of kicking the ball a few times – some kickers would work with their equipment men to do all sorts of clandestine tricks (such as bouncing the balls around in a clothes dryer), all in the name of getting footballs which were easier to kick.
In the 1990s, the combination of better kicking skills and broken-in balls led to the field goal becoming a far more reliable play, from further out, than it had been. (They also noticed more and more kickoffs going into the end zone, but this was before the current concerns about concussions on kick returns). The NFL wanted to encourage teams to go for touchdowns, rather than field goals (as well as to encourage kickoff returns), so they created the “K-ball” in 1999. K-balls are stamped with a “K”, and they’re intended to be used only on kicking plays. They enter the game absolutely brand-new, with no chance for the kickers to break them in. There’s a designated ball-boy at each game, who only supplies K-balls.
Obviously, the K-ball hasn’t entirely removed the long field goal from the game, as two of the three kickers who have tied Dempsey’s record have done so with K-balls, and you have kickers like Janikowski and the Rams’ Greg Zuerlein, who have huge legs and have demonstrated the potential to shatter the record, if the circumstances permit.
An article from Sports Illustrated in 1999 about the K-ball:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1017189/1/index.htm
That’s correct, and some of the next longest plays are also returns of missed field goals: there have been three 108-yard returns, one on a kickoff and two on missed field goals.
But ANY play could result in a bad snap, defense recovering and scoring a touchdown (I’ll grant that with a victory formation kneel-down the chance is very small). So, by that logic, an offense should never run any play at all, because something very bad COULD happen.
I think a better way to look at it is what are the chances that something very bad will happen? And I don’t think that FG attempts leading to defensive TDs happen very often. Certainly less than one out of 100 tries, right, even for long kicks where a return is possible? So if your kicker has just a 3% chance of making the FG, the math says you’re on average coming out ahead by going for the FG.
The colleges back then let you use a kicking tee as well.