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Dustin Hopkins


lavar703

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14 minutes ago, naptownskinsfan said:

I don't know who our backup is on the expanded roster, but chances are they won't be as good as Hopkins.  Best time to explore an upgrade is in the off-season.  We missed the boat on Blankenship from UGA, I wanted us to spend one of our seventh rounders on him.  

But isn’t this kinda silly? There’s a million kickers out there who can’t make field goals. Just cycle them in and out until you find one that can. Hopkins can’t. We’ve been dealing with this for years and the first excuse was “he doesn’t allow kick returns”. He can’t make field goals though so what good is that? Try Veedvek. If he sucks try someone else. Don’t just sit on your hands while Hopkins kicks another season away. 

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Thread to be expected. The XP miss is always a killer.

But missing an XP is not breaking news in the NFL at this point. This was Hopkins’s second missed XP of the season. He now joins the following kickers who have also missed multiple XPs:

Tyler Bass

Harrison Butker

Stephen Gostkowski

Mason Crosby

Jason Myers

Cody Parkey

Rodrigo Blankenship

Ryan Succop

Chris Boswell

Michael Badgley

Joey Slye

Dan Bailey

Ka’imi Fairbairn

Younghoe Koo

Greg Zuerlein

Brandon McManus

Sam Sloman

Sam Ficken

Jake Elliott

Josh Lambo

That’s a total of 20 kickers, in addition to Hopkins. The list of full-time guys who haven’t missed multiple XPs is, as you can imagine, considerably shorter. 

He’s had a rough year. He was clearly hurt in the middle of the season (on the injury list and not practicing for weeks on end), and that clearly hurt him. Literally and figuratively. Since getting some likely needed rest over the bye week, he’s been 15/18 on FGs and 16/17 on XPs. That includes about 10 made FGs from 44 or longer, including 3 crucial kicks in the toughest kicking stadium in the sport (Heinz Field). 

He’s very much an average-ish NFL kicker. His history since arriving here confirms this. If you know of a guy who would be better, I’m sure the staff would love to hear about it. But I think you’re vastly overestimating the quality of the kickers out there on the street available to sign. 

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He’s 58 of 82 from 40+. Im not really sure how that lines up with the rest of the league but it can’t be good. He’s less than 50% over 50. Maybe I’m being too hard on the guy but I just don’t think he’s any good. Again, I could be wrong and living in the moment but I feel like we’ve been here a lot of times with Hopkins. 

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1 hour ago, lavar703 said:

He’s 58 of 82 from 40+. Im not really sure how that lines up with the rest of the league but it can’t be good. He’s less than 50% over 50. Maybe I’m being too hard on the guy but I just don’t think he’s any good. Again, I could be wrong and living in the moment but I feel like we’ve been here a lot of times with Hopkins. 

Well that’s because he’s not that good. But I guess the point is that he’s not that bad. There are several teams running awful kickers out there, and for every Tucker or Lambo or Gano (sigh), there’s 4 or 5 awful kickers floating around the fringes of employment. 

I guess my point is, we’d all love a better kicker. He’s mediocre, we’d love great. But swapping him out for an unknown at this point of the season is a huge risk, and I think we’re better off sticking with the bird in the hand than rummaging around in the bush looking for some untested nobody seems like it could be a recipe for disaster.  

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16 minutes ago, e16bball said:

Well that’s because he’s not that good. But I guess the point is that he’s not that bad. There are several teams running awful kickers out there, and for every Tucker or Lambo or Gano (sigh), there’s 4 or 5 awful kickers floating around the fringes of employment. 

I guess my point is, we’d all love a better kicker. He’s mediocre, we’d love great. But swapping him out for an unknown at this point of the season is a huge risk, and I think we’re better off sticking with the bird in the hand than rummaging around in the bush looking for some untested nobody seems like it could be a recipe for disaster.  

He’s:

Meh Kinda GIF by Cultura

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