the case for Zuerlein

from off the net

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jrry32

Zuerlein’s stats seem bad because the Rams had him kick a ton of long FGs. He was more inaccurate than usual from 50+ yards but I think there’s a strong argument that his confidence taking a beating or his injury (or both) accounts for that. So I think our Kicker is better than he’s given credit for and less of a problem than people believe he is. It’s like criticizing a QB for having a low completion percentage when his team asks him to throw way more intermediate and deep passes than any other QB. We asked Zuerlein to make a ton of low percentage kicks while not giving him a lot of high percentage kicks to offset it.

I think he’d be considered a much better Kicker if he were on a team like New England, Pittsburgh, Green Bay, etc. — for two reasons. He’d have much better numbers due to having a much higher percentage of “high percentage kicks” and he wouldn’t have his confidence wrecked by his head coach trotting him out for long FG after long FG.

Zuerlein struggles on grass because they’re away games. People used the same sort of arguments against Peyton Manning and other “dome QBs” to claim that playing in those optimum conditions inflated their numbers. That is right up until Manning started posting even more ridiculous numbers as a Bronco.

Zuerlein didn’t actually miss plenty of kicks inside 40 yards this year. He was 12 of 13 inside 40 yards (not counting PATs). He actually uncharacteristically missed a lot of kicks in the 40-49 yard range(his career average prior to this year was almost 90% but he only hit 62.5% last year). I’d say the fact that 2 of the 3 misses in that range were blocked had something to do with it.

In fact, if you remove the blocked FGs, Zuerlein’s misses were:

35 yarder against Cleveland
48 yarder against Minnesota
52 yarder against Baltimore
52 yarder against San Francisco
53 yarder against Green Bay
63 yarder against Green Bay
63 yarder against Cleveland

That puts him at 89.5% for the year under 50 yards. Shockingly, that’s almost exactly the same as his career average coming into 2015. Coming into 2015, Zuerlein’s career average was 89.6% within 50 yards. Counting 2015, his career average is at 87.1%.

And that’s not even getting to the injury he was playing through which likely was a contributing factor in Greg’s accuracy percentage in 2015 from 40-49 yards and 50+ yards being around 25% to 30% lower than his career average coming into the year.

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