Kicker Austin Jones played his first game for Alabama two weeks ago. He apparently played his final game for the Crimson Tide last week, when he missed his first two extra-point attempts in a blowout 57-7 win against Arkansas State. This came after Jones had missed a PAT and a 27-yard field goal attempt in the 2018 season opener against Louisville, and Bama head coach Nick Saban decided he had seen enough. Jones was replaced midway through last Saturday’s game by freshman Joseph Bulovas, who made all of his extra points; Alabama confirmed Thursday that the change on the depth chart is permanent.

We could pass this off as just another quirk of one of the most famously futile positions in college sports. All schools struggle with college kickers, but Alabama is better than other college programs at almost everything, and yet its kickers are worse than the national average.

As requested Here is an updated table that includes the % for UA as well as CFB AVG during this period. This makes it look better, however if you take into account how dominant Alabama has been in both recruiting and performance, we have to hold ourselves to a different standard. pic.twitter.com/9gatJhjzCi — Philip Burke (@Philip_Burke) September 6, 2018

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is every Bama missed field goal from 2013 through the 2017 season: some short, some left, some right.

Take a step back, though, and there’s something strange about what has happened to Jones. We know he’s a good kicker. Before coming to Alabama as a graduate transfer this season, he spent four years at Temple. Jones missed only two extra points over his four-season kicking career for the Owls, going 102-of-104, a success rate of better than 98 percent. Now, in just two games with Bama, he’s missed three PATs, going 7-of-10 overall.

Kickers can seem largely insignificant, especially when a team recruits the best players at virtually every offensive and defensive position. But terrible kicking almost cost Bama the last national title. Andy Pappanastos had an easy kick attempt to win January’s championship game against Georgia—a 36-yarder from the middle of the field. Pappanastos missed, sending the game to overtime.

Meanwhile, Georgia kicker Rodrigo Blankenship drilled a 51-yarder in overtime. Luckily for Alabama, it had Tua Tagovailoa and won anyway.

It’s easy to craft a narrative backstory to explain Alabama’s kicker woes. Saban spends all day at the factory where the Tide produce running backs stronger than everybody else’s linebackers and linebackers faster than everybody else’s running backs, and is just too busy to find a kid who can consistently kick the ball through the damn uprights.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the full story: As high school recruits, Alabama’s kickers are routinely rated among the best in the nation. Why can’t Saban process kickers?

Even programs as detail-oriented as Alabama often lack somebody who understands how kickers operate. NCAA rules allow college football teams to have 10 assistant coaches. Typically, teams use those 10 spots on assistants who work primarily with non-specialists, because they have bigger playbooks and more techniques to learn than kickers. A team’s kicker and punter are asked to learn a few specific motions and then get really good at repeating them. They’re generally taught these during the offseason, in private training sessions with professional kicking coaches.

If a school does have an assistant coach dedicated to special teams, their job is usually making sure the team’s kick coverage and return units are up to par, not getting into the nitty-gritty of kicking form. This is why if you go to a college football practice, chances are you’ll see the kickers and punters hanging out in a corner somewhere, mainly coaching themselves. And so, until recently, Saban had never hired a kicking expert. The Tide’s special teams coach from 2008 to 2015 was Bobby Williams, who played running back and defensive back in college and coached running backs and receivers for Saban before they both arrived at Alabama. Special teams was a side gig for Williams; his chief duty was working with tight ends. Rainer Sabin of AL.com wrote that Williams was capable of advising his kickers on only “how kicking related to the team’s coverage schemes”—more or less where to kick the ball, not how to kick it there.

In 2016, Burton Burns, who was starting his 10th season as a Tide assistant coach, was put in charge of Bama’s special teams duties. Last season, Joe Pannunzio, who played quarterback in college and has since carved out a niche as a tight ends–special teams–running backs coach, had the job.

When Alabama (or most college programs, for that matter) goes about recruiting kickers, the staff doesn’t draw from a well of expertise at the position. Scouting high school kickers presents a unique set of challenges; the best ones aren’t visibly larger or faster than their counterparts and probably didn’t kick a ton of field goals in high school. (The top-ranked kicker in the 2018 class, according to 247Sports’s composite recruiting rankings, went 7-of-13 as a high school junior.) At some point, college recruiters have to target kickers based on the word of the few people who do understand kicking mechanics: people who often are paid to coach the kickers themselves. This is a weird world, one that I wrote about for The Atlantic in 2013.

The few people who understand kicking mechanics often shepherd their best players to Alabama. That AL.com story also outlines how Bama “outsources” its kicking recruiting. One former Tide kicker, Cade Foster, explained that he had no relationship with Saban until one day his kicking coach called to let him know that Alabama’s head coach was about to call and offer a scholarship.

As a result, Alabama tends to sign the most sought-after kicking recruits in the country. Adam Griffith, who kicked for the Tide from 2013 to 2016, was the top-rated kicker in the 2012 class. Bulovas, the Tide’s current kicker, was the top 2017 prospect at the position, according to Rivals.com. (He went 11-of-25 on field goals in high school. Do not attempt to parse high school kicking rankings.) Alabama also landed Will Reichard, the no. 1 kicker in the 2019 recruiting rankings, in May.

Alabama’s top prospects at every other position turn into college football stars and later NFL stars. Alabama’s top prospects at kicker turn into bewildered miss machines.

Let’s go back to 2008, Saban’s second year at Alabama. The Tide, who started that season 9-0 and rose to no. 1 in the AP poll, had a chance to knock off the previous season’s national champion, LSU. It seemed so simple; all the Tide had to do was convert a 29-yard field goal, from the middle of the field, with three seconds remaining on the clock. But Leigh Tiffin couldn’t lift the ball over LSU’s defensive line, as Ricky-Jean Francois swatted down the kick.

Bama went on to beat LSU 27-21 in overtime, but wouldn’t be so lucky three years later. No. 1 LSU versus no. 2 Alabama is remembered as one of the games of the century, a contest in which both defenses proved so dominant that neither team was able to reach the end zone. The difference was that LSU went 3-of-3 on field goal tries to win 9-6, while Bama went a godawful 2-of-6. At the time, the Tide were splitting kicking duties between Jeremy Shelley (on short field goals and extra points) and Foster (on field goals longer than 40 yards and kickoffs). Both struggled. Foster missed kicks of 44 and 50 yards on Bama’s first two drives of the game; Saban let Shelley try a 49-yarder on the third drive, and it was blocked. Foster had a chance to redeem himself with a 52-yard attempt in overtime. He missed that, too.

But these were just appetizers for the grandest Alabama Kicking Failure of them all, in the 2013 Iron Bowl. Foster was still Alabama’s kicker at the start of this game, but missed all three kicks that he attempted: of 44, 33, and 44 yards, respectively. So when Bama had a shot at a 57-yarder with the score tied at 28 and one second left in the fourth quarter, Saban sent in then-freshman Adam Griffith—in part because Foster had been unreliable, and in part because Griffith had a stronger leg. But Griffith’s leg wasn’t strong enough to hit from 57, and folks: Auburn won the football game.

(Lost in the utter majesty of the Kick-Six: Griffith, a 5-foot-10 kid who had previously only ever kicked in garbage time and had probably never been tackled before, getting completely obliterated by 300-pound future NFL defensive lineman Gabe Wright.)

Griffith also missed two field goals in Alabama’s loss to Ole Miss in 2014—the final score was 23-17.

Alabama’s kicker last season was Pappanastos. Unlike Griffith, Foster, and many other Bama kickers in the Saban era, he was not highly recruited, but instead a walk-on. So we can rule out the premise that only highly recruited Alabama kickers struggle in big games. Pappanastos nearly cost the Tide a game at Mississippi State by doinking a kick with two minutes to go:

And then came the national championship, which we’ve talked about.

The Crimson Tide have lost only nine games since 2011. Three of them come down to missed field goals. But there’s a sign that things might change. This season, for the first time in recent memory, Bama’s special teams coach is a former specialist: Jeff Banks, a former all-Pac-10 punter at Washington State who most recently worked as special teams coach at Texas A&M. At A&M, Banks coached future NFL kicker Josh Lambo. When Reichard, the no. 1 kicker recruit committed to Bama, was asked about why he wanted to play for the Tide, he cited Banks as one of the main reasons.

All Bama needs to do to erase the stigma that it’s cursed at kicker is produce one good one. The joke always used to be that Bama’s quarterbacks were mediocre; now the Tide have Tagovailoa, the best quarterback in the game. If Banks can fix the kicker thing, Saban’s process will be flawless.

But … well ... through two weeks, it’s not going so great.

Us Bama fans: “hey could you just like ya know... make an extra point?”



Bama’s kicker: pic.twitter.com/NAY4eNjbDs — Chris Huff (@ChrisHuff19_) September 8, 2018

Logic would suggest that with a accomplished kicking coach and top-ranked kicking prospects, Alabama will eventually start making field goals. But I don’t think that’s what the college football gods want. Achilles was perfect besides his garbage heel. Alabama’s flaw is the whole damn foot.