Packers: Mason Crosby has been Excellent since 2018 Debacle in Detroit

After a game to forget in Week 5 of the 2018 season between the Lions and the Green Bay Packers, Mason Crosby has been excellent for nearly two years.

It’s been nearly two years, but I’m sure we all still remember Mason Crosby’s performance on the road against Detroit during Week 5 of the 2018 season. The Green Bay Packers lost the game by eight points as Crosby went 1/5 on field goal attempts and 0/1 on extra-point attempts.

Crosby certainly wasn’t the only player who struggled that day, but it’s easy to do the math and see that he missed 13 points worth of field goal or extra-point attempts.

Although he was a well-established veteran at that point, who had a career field goal percentage of nearly 81 percent, you never truly know how a player is going to respond after what was, to put it kindly, a rough performance.

However, Crosby was unphased. The following week against San Francisco, he would kick the game-winning field goal and would go on to finish the year 19/21 on attempts from Week 6 through the end of the season along with being a perfect 26/26 on extra-point attempts.

That offseason between the 2018 and 2019 seasons, the Green Bay Packers would bring in Sam Ficken to compete with Crosby for the starting kicking job. But as should have been expected, Crosby won that job with relative ease and rewarded GM Brian Gutekunst’s confidence in him with a career season.

On 24 attempts, Crosby posted a career-high field goal percentage of 91.7 percent and was nearly perfect on extra-point attempts, making 40 out of 41. This includes a pair of game-winners against Detroit, one of which came at Ford Field, where Crosby had what is likely the worst performance of his career just over a year earlier.

While we are only three weeks into the 2020 season, it’s been much of the same for Crosby as he continues to knock kicks through the uprights. Entering Week 4, he is a perfect 7/7 on field-goal attempts and 13/13 on extra points.

In fact, since that debacle in Detroit, which was now almost two years ago, Crosby has hit 48 of his last 52 field goal attempts – or 92.3 percent – with three of his four misses coming from 50 yards or more. He is also made 79 of his last 80 extra-point attempts.

The resiliency and mental toughness that Crosby has shown over the last two years cannot be overstated. How often do we see a kicker miss a big field goal or have a poor game, and they are never quite the same again? If you’re not sure, just ask our friends in Chicago and Minnesota.

Typically the only time the kicker is talked about is when something goes wrong, much like an offensive lineman, but fans should appreciate just how reliable Crosby has been over the last two years and really since he entered the NFL back in 2007.