NFL Kickers Just Keep Getting Better (and Better, and Better)
Even as field goal attempts get tougher, NFL kickers are making more of them — and adding more value than ever before.
When Blake Grupe strode out to attempt a go-ahead field goal for the Colts in the final minute of Sunday’s Indianapolis-Seattle game (aka, the Philip Rivers comeback game), it was the type of kick that had seldom even been attempted in that type of situation — until recently. He would be kicking 60 yards to the goalposts, trying to join a 60+ yarder club that still has fewer than 50 members in NFL history, with far fewer of the makes coming to potentially win a game in the final minutes. And yet, Grupe — who was on his second team of the 2025 season — nailed the kick with plenty of room to spare:
Unfortunately for Grupe and the Colts, though, Seattle’s Jason Myers made a 56-yarder of his own just 30 seconds later, handing Indy the loss anyway. And Grupe’s kick, which would have been the longest in NFL history before 1970 and tied for the third-longest ever as recently as 20 years ago, wasn’t even the longest kick of December 2025 to date. (Brandon Aubrey of the Cowboys made a 63-yarder against the Lions on Dec. 4, part of a performance in which he made a record three 55+ yard FGs in a single game.)
That’s to say nothing of the all-time NFL-record 68-yard (!) kick made by Jacksonville’s Cam Little on Nov. 2, itself coming on the heels of Chase McLaughlin’s near-record 65-yarder on Sept. 28… 1 yard further than the 64-yard kick Aubrey made on Sept. 14 to force OT against the Giants. And unofficially, none of those kicks were as long as Little’s 70-yard (!!) make during a preseason game in August.
All told, Grupe provided the 10th total field goal of 60 or more yards in the 2025 season, which is already double the previous record (set in 2022) for most 60-yarders across the league in an NFL season — and there’s still three more weeks left on the calendar. Out of the 49 field goals of 60+ yards ever officially recorded in the NFL, 26 of them (or 53 percent) have come since the start of the 2021 season, which means the total tally of 60-yard FGs in all of history has more than doubled in the past five seasons alone.
To understand how we got here, we need to zoom out and look at the long arc of kicking progress in the NFL over time. What’s happening now is the culmination of a trend that’s been reshaping the sport for decades — one that my old FiveThirtyEight colleague Ben Morris memorably described a decade ago as kickers getting better “just a little bit at a time… until the game is completely different, and no one even noticed.” The difference now is that the effects are no longer subtle, and the improvement is no longer gradual.
