Dave Birkett

Detroit Free Press

Jason Hanson arrived in the NFL in 1992 as a second-round pick out of Washington State.

He played 21 seasons, was Mr. Reliable for the only team he ever knew, and was nudged into retirement in the spring of 2013 as the Detroit Lions’ all-time leading scorer.

Hanson never won a playoff game in Detroit, let alone reach a Super Bowl, and in his first season out of football he found himself selfishly rooting for the Lions not to have too much success without him.

“I was telling people, I joked, that first year I said, ‘I’m not going to watch them. I’m just going to move to Canada and not worry about the Lions,’” Hanson said Thursday after an autograph session before the team’s Member Summit at Ford Field. “Well, of course my kid was into them, so I was watching every weekend. And love the guys, but all I could think about was, ‘Don’t go to the Super Bowl. Don’t go to the Super Bowl, guys.’”

The Lions didn’t go to the Super Bowl that year (or in either of the two seasons since), and Hanson’s absence was part of the reason why, though it’s since been remedied by the addition of Matt Prater.

Hanson made 32 of 36 field goals in his final NFL season, but he dealt with a painful foot injury late in the year and decided to retire when the Lions refused to budge from their take-it-or-leave-it off of a minimum salary benefit deal worth around $1 million.

The going rate for a veteran kicker like Hanson at the time was just north of $2 million, and Hanson acknowledged Thursday that he would have returned for a 22nd season had he still been under contract for 2013.

“All the circumstances at that point for me were just pointing to, you know, it’s time,” Hanson said. “I wasn’t really sure about playing because my foot was hurting so bad and it just happened that I was having a hard time getting excited to do it again and that was the final piece.

“Hey look, minimum in the NFL is a ridiculous amount of money. So I didn’t tell them that, but I would have played for that. I mean, that’s a lot of money. But at the same time it was like, OK, if they’re saying, ‘Hey, we like you, but we can go get someone else and what do you want to do?’ I was like, ‘OK, well, that’s fine.’ If there’s no passion on their end, then I’m going to feel the same way. So no, it wasn’t just that, but all of it together.”

The Lions signed David Akers days after Hanson retired, but Akers made just 19 of 24 field goals in his only season with the team and lost the trust of then-coach Jim Schwartz late in the season.

The next year, they took kicker Nate Freese in the seventh round of the draft, only to have Freese bomb out three games into the season when he missed four attempts of 40-plus yards. Freese’s replacement, Alex Henery, wasn’t any better, missing four of his five field goal attempts in two games.

“It’s weird because the rookie that they had, I didn’t pick him but they even asked me what I thought and I thought, you know, he doesn’t have a monster leg but he looks technically good,” Hanson said. “And then he pretty much made everything in preseason and then just (struggled under pressure). How do you know?

“And then Akers is a great NFL kicker. I think it’s just hard. Some guys can bounce around, but sometimes as a kicker you go somewhere, you get like a narrow window to have somebody like you and all it takes is a miss or two for the boos to come raining down and the pressure, and that’s I think kind of what happened to him. But again, I knew when they got Prater they had a great kicker. He’s awesome.”

Prater signed midway through the 2014 season and has been one of the NFL’s steadiest legs since.

Hanson said Prater and Lions punter Sam Martin are so good that he doesn’t feel the need to come practices and training camp anymore, like he did occasionally at the team’s request to help Freese.

Instead, Hanson, who’s made peace with his decision to retire when he did – “If I was still under contract, I would have come back and played, kind of like that’s what I’m supposed to do and got in the rehab room and tried to get better. But it was just time. So I’m over it now. I’m over myself. It’s good to be done,” he said – spends his free time with his family, at speaking engagements and tutoring about a half dozen local kickers on an informal basis.

“No official career yet,” Hanson said. “But it’s staying busy so it’s been good.”

Hanson said he still keeps regular tabs on the Lions and he made it to Ford Field for at least one game last year.

He didn’t, however, get to see the Lions win at Lambeau Field last November, something – like that Super Bowl – he never accomplished in his 21 seasons.

“That weekend I went hunting in Montana and I was out hunting and I come out of the field and I have like 40 texts on my phone,” Hanson said. “(They were) from everybody I know. From friends and a few former players and then Mule (long snapper Don Muhlbach) and some of the guys on the team are like, ‘Haha, you never did it.’”

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!

Detroit Lions icons: Did we miss someone?

Lions: Cheerleaders, Color Rush unis, more ticket hikes coming soon?