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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
Back home in Flowery Branch, Georgia, Maddux Trujillo‘s parents were a wreck, watching from their living room as their son trotted onto the field, just seconds left in the first half of Temple’s game against Utah State. But he had none of those nerves. The Owls had gotten the ball with just 5 seconds to play, hit an 11-yard completion and called timeout with a single tick remaining. The ball was four yards beyond midfield.
Trujillo’s special teams coach, Adam Scheier, had given him a look and posed the obvious question: “Is it too far?”
The kick would be a 64-yard attempt. That week, Trujillo had made a 62-yarder in practice with room to spare, but that really didn’t matter. He wanted this chance, whether it was too far or not.
Then he looked at the goalposts from his starting point, nearly 70 yards away, and the scope of the situation finally landed.
“I go out there and look at it and think, ‘That’s pretty far,'” Trujillo said. “In practice it looked a lot shorter.”
Looking back, Trujillo insists he didn’t connect with the ball as well as he would have liked. He called it a B, B+ kick, and when it left his foot, he assumed it was a bad miss. But the ball kept sailing through the air, spinning right to left, eventually hooking just inside the right upright, clanging off the crossbar and through for three points.
The kick was the longest made field goal at the FBS level in 16 years and just a yard shy of the modern record — an era from 1992 until now — set by Martin Gramatica in 1998. (Prior to 1989, kickers used tees for field goals.) It was the longest field goal made — in college or the NFL — at Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles.
Ove Johansson of Abilene Christian holds the mark for the longest college football field goal at 69 yards in 1976.
It was a remarkable moment for a guy who grew up undersized with promises from his family he would ultimately fill out to something closer to his current 6-foot-1, 170-pound frame, but Trujillo’s 64-yarder was just the high-water mark in what has been a history-making season for college kickers overall.
Twenty years ago, college kickers connected on just 76% of field goals of 40 yards or less. This year, they’re hitting 87.5%. From 2004 through 2020, kickers made only about 55% of tries beyond 40 yards. Since 2021, that rate is better than 60%, including 62.2% in 2024. And prior to 2021, kickers had never made more than 96 field goals of 50 yards or more in a season. They’re on pace for 193 this year. Kickers have already hit 129 50-yarders through Week 10, just one shy of last year’s total across FBS.
“People push each other to get better and better,” Trujillo said. “Everybody’s shooting for the stars. You see the same thing with baseball pitchers. You didn’t used to see guys consistently throwing 100, but now every team has a guy doing it.”
This is a stark shift at a position that, until recently, was far more likely to be the butt of jokes than a cause for celebration.
Just follow social media during any big moment when a team trots out its kicker to hit a chip shot to win a game only to see it doink off the upright or sail into the next zip code, and the inevitable refrain is employed: “College kickers!” For decades, the joke didn’t require a punchline — or, perhaps, it was all punchline — because it was simply understood that any time an 18-to 22-year-old specialist took the field, the range of possible outcomes could vary from ridiculous to sublime, with a heavy emphasis on the former.
And it’s true that, even in this apparent golden era of 2024, the meme hasn’t disappeared. In late October, Duke‘s kicker, Todd Pelino, missed an extra point, a 42-yard field goal and had a 30-yarder blocked as time expired before losing to SMU in overtime. Head coach Manny Diaz opted to go for two following a potential tying touchdown rather than trot his beleaguered specialist back out one more time. Cal nearly delivered Pitt its first loss of the season Oct. 12, only to miss a 40-yard field goal late in the fourth quarter — one of eight misses on the year for a team that has lost four games by a combined total of nine points. Things got so bad after Arizona State‘s 24-14 loss to Cincinnati on Oct. 19 that coach Kenny Dillingham held open tryouts for a new kicker.
So perhaps it remains true that finding 130-some kickers good enough to play at the FBS level remains a chore, but each year, more and more are proving long kicks aren’t nearly as big a risk as they used to be.
Like most kickers, SMU’s Collin Rogers played soccer in high school. It wasn’t until his sophomore year he tried out for the football team, and for a while, he hated it.
“It just wasn’t my thing,” Rogers said. “But I kept working at it and training and eventually I got really good and got a scholarship.”
From there, Rogers began working with trainers, including Dallas-based coach Brian Egan, who said the personalized training regimen and skill-specific training has allowed kickers to advance by leaps and bounds. But it works both ways. The training has improved, but so, too, have the caliber of athletes trying their hand — or foot — at kicking.
It’s true, place kicking isn’t for everyone, acknowledged Jamie Kohl, director of Kohl’s Professional Camps, which has trained kickers nationally since 2000, but the stigma of the kicker as the smallest and least-popular player on the team has waned in recent years.
Rogers has already booted seven field goals of 50 yards or more this season — just one shy of tying Tennessee’s Fuad Reveiz, who made eight in 1982 — back when tees were still in use. In a game against Louisville on Oct. 5, SMU coach Rhett Lashlee sent Rogers out for a 55-yarder. He drilled it, giving SMU a double-digit lead before the half, marking a career-long field goal and, as the videoboard showed afterward, giving Rogers the school’s all-time record for scoring.
“You look at the graphic they made — I beat out Eric Dickerson and Doak Walker,” Rogers said.
Florida State’s Ryan Fitzgerald, who is 5-of-5 on kicks of 50 yards or more, including a 59-yarder against Georgia Tech, said kickers typically emphasize three key areas now: mobility, flexibility and explosiveness. He does yoga and Pilates to increase his flexibility, but building those skills has become far easier in the football weight room in recent years.
Years ago, Kohl said, it was routine for specialists to simply follow the same training regimen as the rest of the team, but as teams have added analysts, assistant coaches and strength staff who specialize in kicking, the workouts have become tailored for maximizing the skills of kickers — giving the position the same type of precise training receivers or linebackers get.
“A lot of it comes down to it’s a new era of kickers where you see a lot of fast-twitch muscles excelling rather than just leg muscles,” Vanderbilt kicker Brock Taylor said. “As a skinny, tall guy, I think that’s my fast twitch more than anything. I’m not exactly built like an SEC football player, but the strength staff knows what my strong suits are and how to capitalize on training.”
When Taylor tweaked his lower back a few weeks ago doing a hip flexor workout, the training staff addressed the issue immediately, tweaking the drill to reduce stress on his back but still build flexibility through his hips. In a prior era, Kohl said, kickers would’ve almost certainly just kept running through the same routine until a more serious injury upended their season.
The position specific training doesn’t require a full-time staff of hands-on coaches, however. Kickers these days can perfect their craft with little more than an iPad.
Kohl remembers some of the first camps he ran in the early 2000s, when watching film meant popping a VHS tape in and squinting through the squiggly lines as he played the tape back at slow speed.
When Kohl started holding kicking camps in the early 2000s, he invested in a $2,000 VHS recorder to get good film on his students. The result was nevertheless grainy, with kickers squinting at slow-motion replays hoping to decipher critical points in their approach and follow-through.
“If these kids saw the film breakdown we did back then, they’d laugh,” he said.
Now, Kohl can get high resolution film with his iPhone, and the video is then clipped, cut and distributed for review in minutes.
Taylor said he’s “addicted” to watching film, with more than 1,000 videos on his camera roll dating to his sophomore year in high school, which he still rewatches to compare and critique his technique.
“Most of the time, the video doesn’t even play through,” Taylor said. “I pause it and then swipe through my fingers slowly to go through each freeze frame of my swing through.”
The improved technology has also coincided with a more soccer-style approach to kicking that relies on precise balance and follow-through.
Just as the influx of former Aussie rules football players into college football shifted punting style in the past decade, Rogers said kickers are now approaching their job with more of a soccer mindset — using the entire body’s momentum to drive the football rather than relying entirely on leg strength. Rogers points to pros like Justin Tucker and Harrison Butker, who throw so much weight into driving the kick that they nearly tumble to the ground after booting the ball.
“Your ball contact has to be great, and it’s about maintaining leg speed and strength while having that precision and technique,” Trujillo said. “Having that consistency with what we call pop through the football, it does wonders.”
Interestingly, the new era of kicking has dovetailed with the rise of analytics. A decade ago, fourth down was owned by the kickers and punters, but the influx of hard data convinced coaches to reevaluate the risk-reward balance of running an offensive play instead. Indeed, the number of fourth-down conversion attempts increased by 60% from 2004 to 2023. That would, in theory, lead to fewer long kicks, but in fact, the opposite has been true.
This year, college kickers are on pace to attempt 368 kicks of 50 yards or more — nearly double the amount they tried just 15 years ago.
“I’m always inching out onto the field on fourth down ready to go,” Fitzgerald said. “I make sure he can see me.”
Perhaps the improvement in kicking — particularly on long kicks — is simply a matter of Darwinian evolution. Analytics threatened to eliminate the most exciting part of the job, so kickers fought back.
“It’s funny, everybody wants to talk about analytics,” Trujillo said. “It doesn’t take into account the kicker you have, and I tend to think I do better in high pressure, adrenaline moments, and the adrenaline gets pumping for longer field goals.”
Egan said there’s no single explanation for the recent success of kickers. It’s the tech, it’s the training, it’s the mechanics. But mostly, it’s just kickers keeping pace with the evolution of the game.
“You’re seeing players run faster than they ever have or jump higher than they ever have or bench press more,” Egan said. “I think this is just our way of showing our evolution.”
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