It’s late August and the Packers still haven’t figured out their kicker situation. They probably won’t this year, either. More than likely, they’re probably going to stick with Anders Carlson, which in turn means that barring a somewhat unexpected turnaround from Carlson, kicking is going to be an adventure this year.

Or, just as likely, we’re probably going to be worrying about Carlson to some extent for the next few months.

Carlson is a lot like Sean Clifford in my estimation. The Packers drafted both Carlson and Clifford heading into what figured to be a two-year rebuilding process. Heading into the 2023 season, nobody honestly could have expected the Packers to be potential Super Bowl contenders heading into the 2024 season. Remember, just a year ago the Packers’ young talent that we’re all excited about today was still largely unknown, and on top of that, the Packers weren’t really expected to be cap solvent until 2025.

In the middle of all that, the Packers drafted both Carlson and Clifford. Carlson was not exactly a highly touted kicking prospect and Clifford was the last quarterback taken during a mid-round run of quarterbacks in the 2023 draft. But that’s more or less fine when you’re expecting to play football that doesn’t matter. You can have placeholder guys at kicker and backup quarterback while you get the rest of your house in order.

But lo and behold, the Packers’ young offense exploded, and so did the NFL salary cap. Now the Packers are ahead of schedule in their rebuild, but they’re still more or less stuck with these two guys.

Laying aside Clifford, who should never be playing football that matters this year, let’s talk about Carlson. Why worry about him? And what are the Packers committing to if they decide to stick with him?

The problem with Carlson is that he’s a very specific kind of inaccurate. Kicking, on its face, is a simple job: put ball through uprights with foot. But the best kickers are the ones that make kicks others don’t. How do you measure that? You weight for distance.

Acme Packing Company’s Justis Mosqueda developed a neat way to do this. First, you determine what the average conversion rate is on a kick from a given distance. The NFL and college football break their kicking statistics down into 10-yard increments, which makes this job easy. Then you multiply that rate times three to give you the expected value of kicks from each of those distances. For example, if the average conversion rate for kicks from 30-39 yards is 75% (it’s not, but just run with the example), the expected points on a kick from that distance is 2.25. 

You then take the number of kicks a player made from that distance and multiply it by three (the actual value of the kick), then multiply the number of attempts he took from that distance by the relevant expected points. That should tell you how much more valuable than average a kicker is from a specific distance.

Continuing our example, if a kicker made 8 out of 10 attempts from 30-39 yards in a given season and the average conversion rate is 75% from that distance, he would have produced 1.5 points of value over what we’d expect. Simple enough, right?

By Mosqueda’s method, Anders Carlson was the worst kicker drafted by an NFL team between 2018 and 2023, and that’s almost entirely because he was terribly inaccurate from 40-49 yards and 50-59 yards. There’s our first big worry.

But it gets a little bit worse. In 2023, Carlson produced 2.22 points of extra value on his field goal attempts — but still offered negative value from distance. He produced -4.8 points of value from 40-49 yards and -0.3 points of value from 50-59 yards. In short, he played exactly how he did in college.

And to make matters even a little bit worse, Carlson’s “extra value” is probably a bit of a mirage. He attempted 14 kicks from the 30-39 yard distance in 2023, making all of them. That’s good, but I’m not sure arguing that you were adding value from such a short distance is that strong of a point.

Zooming out a bit, here are Carlson’s numbers in some broader context. I ran the numbers on every season of Mason Crosby and Greg Joseph’s respective careers and compared them to Carlson’s. Here’s their total value added as well as their value added at each kicking distance.

Carlson is pretty much smack dab in the middle, though notably he’s better than Joseph’s 2022 and 2023 seasons, which is important because Joseph spent those seasons mostly kicking inside as a member of the Minnesota Vikings. 

This could be worse, but I think there are a couple of reasons for concern here. Mason Crosby’s bad seasons are primarily dragged down by some bad efforts from long distance. In 2012, for example, Crosby attempted nine kicks from 50-59 yards, but made just two. In 2009, another down year, he went just 2 for 6 from that distance.

Carlson didn’t get that many reps from the same distance, and I think that’s because the Packers didn’t think he could hit them. They’d have good reason to think so, too, because he underperformed from 50-59 yards in college relative to expectations. 

Carlson’s 2023 season is also one of just five out of 23 seasons on this list where the kicker in question was below expectations from both 40-49 yards and 50-59 yards. The others? Greg Joseph in 2023 (setting up quite the kicking battle in Packers’ camp!), Mason Crosby in 2007 (a rookie), Mason Crosby in 2023 (a certified old man), and Mason Crosby in 2009 (of the aforementioned nine 50+ yard attempts). 

There is some reason for optimism in that revelation, though. Carlson’s predecessor, Mason Crosby, shows exactly how high variance kicking can be. Crosby swung from plus kicker to negative kicker based mainly on how he did from distance. Perhaps Carlson can shore up his long-distance kicking and become a more valuable kicker in the process?

It’s possible, but based on what we’ve seen from Carlson to this point, probably isn’t all that likely. He was inaccurate from long distance in college and continued that trend in his first NFL season. Changing things around now would be quite a reversal.