Should The Packers Be Worried About The Kicker Position?

The Green Bay Packers have a serious problem with their kicker, or lack thereof.

Of course Mason Crosby is still on the team, but he is currently on the PUP list and his status for the start of the season is in question as he deals with an injury to his right knee that he had scoped in July.

So as he deals with that the Packers had brought in Gabe Brkic, who was recently cut after a horrible miss that nearly went into the 49ers tunnel in the Packers preseason opener in Santa Clara. He was also dealing with an injury.

To replace Brkic the Packers signed Ramiz Ahmed who had most recently played for the USFL’s Pittsburgh Maulers.

Ahmed had a good debut in the second preseason game, making both field goals and extra points that he attempted. However, Ahmed was not a super accurate kicker in his 10 games with the Maulers as he missed eight of his 22 field goal attempts.

Ahmed has a past of missing a lot of kicks. When combining his college and pro field goal attempts he is making just over 69 percent of his kicks. That doesn’t work in the NFL.

But what also doesn’t work in the NFL is leading the league in missed field goals, as Mason Crosby did last year. Crosby was 25 of 34 in the 2022 regular season, with all nine of his misses coming in an eight-week stretch in the middle of last year.

Crosby had rebounded from a poor 2018 campaign, which included the horror show in Detroit in which he missed five kicks—four field goals and an extra point. He went on to only miss two field goals in 2019 (22-24) and going perfect field goal wise in 2020 (16-16).

It wouldn’t be hard to believe that Crosby, once he returns to the Packers, will struggle.

He is going to have a new holder in former Bears punter Pat O’Donnell and he will be working with a new long snapper as well because of the poor performances by the current people in house.

But due to the lack of kicking talent on the open market at the moment, this problem is likely one that doesn’t have a solvable solution from the Packers end.

The easiest solution, and the one that the Packers are probably going to be banking on, is Mason Crosby returning to 2019 and 2020 form  and hoping that Rich Bisaccia’s special teams unit will be better than Maurice Drayton’s, which had three field goals blocked last year, including one in the three point loss in the Wild Card game to the 49ers.