Written August 24, 2026, during the final week of NFL preseason. Cutdown day is Sunday, August 30 — some of the situations below will have resolved by the time you read this.
Every August the same thing happens and every August it still stings to watch: a couple dozen kickers who are among the best in the world at what they do get evaluated on about fifteen kicks, and roughly half of them lose their jobs over one bad Thursday night. The 2026 preseason has been a particularly brutal example. There is a real lesson in it for anyone kicking at any level, and it is not the one people usually take away.
What happened: Washington ends its competition
On August 17, the Commanders released veteran Jake Moody and handed the kicking job to undrafted rookie Drew Stevens, per reporting from The Washington Post and Sports Illustrated. The two had been competing since OTAs.
Look closely at how it ended. Reporting describes Moody struggling with makeable kicks during the last block of training camp, and his final field goal attempt with the team was a 29-yarder in the preseason opener against Miami that went through off the right upright. Twenty-nine yards. Not a 57-yard bomb into the wind — a chip shot that grazed metal.
Stevens, 22, arrived as a free agent out of Iowa, where he set school records with 76 career field goals made and a 58-yarder as the program’s longest. An undrafted rookie beat out a kicker with NFL starts on his résumé, because in this job the résumé is not what gets weighed. The last twenty kicks are.
What happened: New England reopens a question
In the Patriots’ preseason opener on August 14, incumbent Andy Borregales missed three field goals against the Colts, including a potential game-winner in what finished a tie. Head coach Mike Vrabel was asked afterward whether he would bring in competition and said the team would talk about it and see where things stood, per 98.5 The Sports Hub and Boston.com. Vrabel’s line was blunt: “We’re expected to make them. That’s pro football.”
Borregales had won the New England job the previous summer over Parker Romo, who is on the roster as the second kicker. One preseason afternoon turned a settled position back into an open one.
Across the league, a handful of teams are still carrying two kickers into the final preseason weekend, and when Week 1 arrives there will be roughly 32 kicking jobs in the entire sport — FanSided has been tracking every open battle. Final cuts to 53 are due Sunday, August 30.
What this means for kickers at your level
You are not competing for one of 32 NFL jobs this week. But the evaluation logic that just decided those jobs is the exact same logic your high school coach, your college coach, and every camp evaluator uses. It is worth understanding while the examples are fresh.
1. You are judged on your misses, not your makes
Nobody lost a job this month for failing to make a 55-yarder. They lost jobs on 29-yarders and on a tying kick that should have been routine. That is how kicker evaluation has always worked and always will: a coach is not buying your ceiling, he is buying the absence of disasters.
Which means your practice allocation is probably wrong. Most kickers spend the back half of every session seeing how far they can hit it, because that is the fun part. Go count your reps this week. If more than a quarter of your kicks are from beyond your realistic game range, you are practicing the thing you will never be cut for and skipping the thing you will. Set a floor: no long-range work until you have made ten in a row from 30 to 35 yards. Boring, and it is the actual job. There is more on structuring this in consistency for field goals made simple.
2. The evaluation window is always smaller than you think
Moody’s competition ran from OTAs through August — months of work — and the thing everyone remembers is one attempt off the upright. Your tryout is the same shape. A coach watching you at a camp sees maybe fifteen balls. A college coach watching your film watches ninety seconds of it.
The implication is not “be perfect,” which is useless advice. It is: build a routine that produces your normal kick when you are cold, watched, and out of rhythm, because that is the only condition under which anyone will ever evaluate you. Warm-up kicks with your buddies are not the skill. Kick five, walk away for ten minutes, come back and kick one that counts. That is the rep that matters, and it is the one nobody practices. If you have not built a repeatable pre-kick sequence, start at how to find a pre-kick routine that works for you.
3. Recent form beats résumé — in both directions
An undrafted rookie out of Iowa just took a job from a kicker with NFL experience. Read that as encouragement, because it applies to you: nobody is permanently ahead of you on a depth chart. The sophomore who was the starter last year is not protected by last year. Kicking is the most nakedly meritocratic position in football, which is brutal when you are the incumbent and wonderful when you are not.
The flip side is that your own past results protect you from nothing. Which is a good reason to keep a real log — attempts, makes, distances, conditions — instead of a vague memory of being pretty good. Kickers who track honestly know their true percentage from 35 to 40. Kickers who do not, guess high. The volume side of that is worth thinking about too: see what should your field goal kick count be.
4. Three misses in a game happens to everyone
Borregales had one of those afternoons in front of a new head coach and a stadium full of people. It happens to every kicker who plays long enough — the question is only what the next kick looks like. The difference between a bad game and a lost job is usually the three weeks after the bad game, and that is a skill you can rehearse rather than a temperament you either have or do not.
We wrote about the mechanics of it in how to bounce back from a shanked field goal or punt, and about the in-game version in how to stop being nervous in games. Read them before you need them, not after.
The thing that quietly decides most competitions
Here is a detail that rarely makes the coverage. When two kickers are close, the tiebreaker is often not field goal percentage at all — it is whether the guy can also handle kickoffs, whether his operation is clean with a new holder, and whether he is easy to work with in a specialist room. Roster math is unforgiving: one spot, three jobs’ worth of value wanted.
At the high school and college level, that same logic is why the kicker who can also punt, or who can genuinely place a kickoff, is the one who travels. If you only do one of the three specialist jobs well, the fastest way to get on a field is to become passable at a second. The kickoff side starts with finding your kickoff steps — and if you want to see where the pro kickoff is heading, the 2026 NFL kickoff rule changes are pushing hard toward placement over raw distance.
Frequently asked questions
Who won the Commanders kicker competition in 2026?
Undrafted rookie Drew Stevens out of Iowa. Washington released veteran Jake Moody on August 17, 2026, ending a competition that had run since OTAs. Stevens set Iowa school records with 76 career field goals made and a 58-yard long.
When is the NFL final roster cutdown in 2026?
Sunday, August 30, 2026, when teams must reduce to 53 players. That deadline is why the last preseason weekend is when most remaining kicker competitions get resolved, followed by waiver claims and practice-squad signings.
What do NFL teams actually evaluate in a kicker competition?
Reliability on makeable kicks far more than range. Misses inside 40 yards end competitions; long-range makes rarely save them. Kickoff ability, clean operation with the snapper and holder, and consistency across a small sample are the usual tiebreakers.
The takeaway
Kickers like us do not get graded on our best day. We get graded on the day someone happens to be watching, using the kicks nobody thinks are hard. Spend this week’s practice accordingly: ten in a row from 32, a cold kick after a ten-minute break, and an honest log of what actually went in.
Everything above is free and yours to use tonight. If you want the whole system — technique, operation, and how to structure a week — in one place, The Art of Kicking covers it. And if you want a set of eyes on your film before your own evaluation window opens, coaching is open. Keep crushing it.
