For the third offseason in a row, the Detroit Lions face uncertainty at kicker. Ever since Matt Prater chose greener pastures in Arizona after the 2020 season, the Lions have cycled through potential replacements.
It has not gone well.
Austin Seibert. Riley Patterson. Zane Gonzalez. Aldrick Rosas. Ryan Santoso. Dominik Eberle. All had their chances — some more than one — and they all quickly fizzled away.
The last replacement attempt has been the most successful thus far. Michael Badgley joined the Lions in Week 7 and quickly proved capable. He was perfect on placekicks in his first five games.
Alas, Badgley’s hot streak came to an end. He finished the season making 20 of his 24 field goal attempts for the Lions. Most painful was the 29-yarder Badgley yanked wide in the 3-point loss to the Bills on Thanksgiving, his first miss for Detroit.
Badgley is one of the Lions’ pending free agents this offseason. The 27-year-old is good enough to bring back, but also not so good that Lions GM Brad Holmes couldn’t find a better kicker.
Badgley finished the season ranked 18th in the NFL in field goal percentage at 24-for-28 (he was 4-for-4 with Chicago before joining the Lions). He tied for 18th with Patterson, who became the full-time kicker for the Jaguars. On long field goals, Badgley was 2-for-3 from beyond 50 yards with a long of 53. The “Money Badger” was perfect on extra points, one of just three kickers league-wide to hit all conversions.
One knock against Badgley is that he typically does not handle kickoffs. In five NFL seasons, Badgley has just 27 kickoffs to his credit, including eight with the Lions. His career touchback percentage on kickoffs is 25.9, a very low figure that helps explain why his teams have typically had the punter handle kickoffs. That’s not a dealbreaker for Detroit; punter Jack Fox ranked 10th in the league (min. 10 attempts) in touchback percentage at 71.4.
Badgley stacks up pretty well against the rest of the free agent class in 2023. The top names include Green Bay’s Mason Crosby, Robbie Gould from the 49ers, Greg Zuerlein of the Jets, Prater from Arizona, Minnesota’s Greg Joseph and Eddy Piniero from Carolina.
Age all but rules out Crosby (38), Gould (40), Zuerlein (35) and even Prater (38), who was the NFL’s least-accurate continuously employed kicker over the last three seasons when combining FGs and XPs; Zuerlein is 2nd on that list. Joseph was 4-for-10 from beyond 50 yards but missed a league-high…
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