While the Green Bay Packers seem to be content with their new kicker Brayden Narveson, as Packers receiver Jayden Reed proclaimed, “He like that,” in the locker room on Sunday, it’s still worth keeping an eye on the kicker market around the league. I mean, how often do teams pick up an undrafted free agent rookie kicker in August and it works? I would venture to guess less than half of the time.
With that in mind, I decided to poke around NFL rosters to see how many teams are carrying a second kicker. To my surprise, the Packers are one of the very few teams doing so going into Week 1. Gone are the days of multiple specialists on the active roster and practice squad, which were the norm when the practice squad first expanded during the 2020 Covid season.
As of Monday, there isn’t a single NFL team that carries a second kicker on the 53-man roster. That’s not surprising. What is a bit of a shock is that only four teams are keeping a second kicker on the practice squad. Of those four teams, three — including the Packers — have kickers that are being counted as international exemptions. This is to say that if the kickers were Americans, rather than international players who didn’t count against teams’ practice squad counts, they might not have jobs, either.
Every team now has an international exemption they’re allowed to use on their 16-man practice squad, which functionally makes their practice squad a 17-player unit, as long as they’re willing to pay for that extra player. The Packers are using their exemption on kicker Alex Hale, who played at Oklahoma State but is originally from Australia. Like Green Bay, the New York Giants and New Orleans Saints are also keeping international specialists on their practice squad, leaving the Indianapolis Colts’ Spencer Shrader as the only American kicker on an NFL practice squad.
So if you’re wondering who else is still available on the street, it’s pretty much every kicker who doesn’t currently have a starting job. With that context, it’s not surprising that Greg Joseph and Anders Carlson, the two kickers the Packers recently released, haven’t been picked up anywhere. At this point, there seems to be no demand for the position, at least until teams’ starters begin to underperform or get injured in action.
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