Why the kicking battle could decide Super Bowl LIX: Chiefs vs. Eagles has two of best playoff kickers ever

NEW ORLEANS — On paper, Super Bowl LIX is setting up to be one of the most evenly matched games of all-time. Even the oddsmakers are expecting a close game with the Kansas City Chiefs favored by just 1.5 points over the Philadelphia Eagles. 

When you have a game that’s expected to be close, there’s a good chance that it could come down to a field goal, which is exactly what happened the last time these two teams played each other in the NFL’s biggest game. In Super Bowl LVII, Harrison Butker hit a 27-yard field goal with just eight seconds left to give Kansas City a 38-35 win. 

Although Butker hit that kick, he did miss one earlier in the game and that’s because when it comes to kicking field goals in the Super Bowl, nothing is a given. The overall field goal percentage in Super Bowl history is just 75.4%. When you only look at attempts from 45 yards or longer, the percentage drops to 52.2, which essentially makes it a coin toss. 

The Super Bowl is a high-powered pressure cooker that has gotten the best of many kickers throughout history. There’s a fine line between famous and infamous for kickers at the Super Bowl. For every Adam Vinatieri, there’s a Scott Norwood. If you make a big kick, you’re a hero forever, but if you miss the kick, you go down in infamy. 

If this year’s Super Bowl comes down to a big kick, the Chiefs and Eagles will probably be feeling good about the guy they send out there. On the Eagles’ end, they have Jake Elliott, who is the fifth-most accurate kicker in NFL playoff history with a 95.7% hit rate. On the other hand, the Chiefs’ have Butker, who has hit 32 STRAIGHT postseason kicks, a stat that includes both extra points and field goals.

There are only 13 kickers in NFL history who have attempted at least 10 postseason field goals and made at least 90% of them and Butker and Elliott are both on that list. Basically, these are two of the most clutch postseason kickers in NFL history and it won’t be surprising if the game is decided by one of them. 

Elliott couldn’t put his exact finger on why he’s been so good in the playoffs, but he did say that he does get into a “different mental space” for the postseason. 

“I think when you get to these games, the magnitude of them puts you in a little bit different mental space and for me, that is helpful to kind of just lock in a little bit more,” Elliott told CBS Sports in a one-on-one conversation. “I don’t know that I change mentality or anything, but I love big moments. That’s why you do this.”

As he said, Elliott definitely loves the big moments, which might explain why the one field goal he points to as the favorite one of his career came in a previous Super Bowl. During the Eagles’ 41-33 win over the Patriots to cap the 2017 season, Elliott hit a 46-yard field goal to put the Eagles up eight with 65 seconds left to play in the game. 

The Eagles kicker is almost always reliable, but fans in Philly have had to hold their breath every time he gets sent out to attempt a kick longer than 50 yards this year. From 50 yards and in, Elliott was actually impressive in 2024, hitting 34 of 36 kicks, including the playoffs (That’s 94.4%). However, Elliott has gone 0-for-7 from 51 yards and longer. 

Falling into a rut like that can sometimes get into a kicker’s head: They start to question their mechanics, they start to question their steps, they start to question their sanity. But for Elliott, that hasn’t been the case. 

The Eagles kicker actually feels good about the way he’s been hitting the ball. When asked specifically about his long-distance struggles, Elliott said that everything is mostly working for him, the kicks just haven’t been going in. 

“I think I actually hit the ball pretty well all year,” Elliott said. “I think I was put in a couple tougher situations, and sometimes, those ones don’t go through and they’re unfortunate. I still feel very good about how I’m hitting the ball and I’m just very process oriented every week: Watch some film, try to correct it and get back and make a big plan for the next week.”

To Elliott’s point, three of his seven misses came from 57 or longer, a distance where all NFL kickers combined to hit just 58.5% of their attempts in 2024, including playoff games. Although he’s struggled this year, Elliott certainly has the leg to hit those kicks. In 2023, he hit one of the most impressive field goals in NFL regular-season history when he drilled a 59-yarder in a driving rain to send a game against Buffalo into overtime. 

Kickers might be the most ritualistic players on the field and if they feel like their process is working, they’re going to stick to it and Elliott feels like his process is working. For the 30-year-old, who was drafted by the Bengals in 2017, his process includes eating a quesadilla the night before any game. 

Elliott might be struggling from long range, but he seems confident that his long kicks won’t be an issue in the Super Bowl if the Eagles need him to hit one. 

If you kick long enough, you’re going to enter a rut at some point in your career, and it’s something that Butker has also dealt with. After missing four games with a knee injury this year, Butker came back and promptly missed two kicks in his first three games. 

Like Elliott, Butker didn’t panic just because he started to miss a few kicks. 

“You got to be consistent over weeks and months and it’s easy to have a good game or a good practice, it’s about how you make sure that when you’re on your worst day of kicking, you’re still a pretty good kicker,” Butker said this week. 

If Butker can’t shake his struggles, he’ll look to change his mental process, because changing your technique in the middle of the season isn’t something that most kickers want to deal with (Butker said he actually did change his technique after coming back from an ankle injury in 2022). 

“When you’re a kicker, especially when you’re in the middle of the season, sometimes you don’t want to focus too much on the technique aspect,” Butker said. “If the ball is going in, keep doing that. If it’s not going in, what’s the smallest adjustment I can make to make the kick. I think a lot of times, the best thing a kicker can do is adjust how they mentally approach the kick. Maybe it’s different cues that they have.”

To give you an idea of how complicated kicking can be, consider this: Butker generally lands on his left knee when he finishes a kick, which you can see below. 

That left knee is the one Butker had surgery on during the 2024 season and when he came back from that injury, his mechanics were slightly off: he couldn’t get the knee where he wanted it, but he said the problem eventually fixed itself. 

“When I was coming back from my knee injury, when I was kicking alone and not during the team periods, I didn’t fall down on that left knee,” Butker said. “But as soon as you get in that pressure team period, that’s when I was falling down on the knee, so I just decided at the end of the day, when I get into a big moment, I’m going to revert back to what my body wants to do. Being in Year 8, you can only focus on technique so much, you’ve been doing it for so long, your body is going to do what it wants to do, especially in those pressure moments.”

Although the pressure is higher in the Super Bowl, both Butker and Elliott do a good job of compartmentalizing it. For Butker, that means practicing kicks so often that he doesn’t feel any different when he’s attempting a practice kick or a kick in the Super Bowl. 

“I have the same routine whether it’s a game-winning kick or a first quarter extra point,” Butker said. “If I can continue to do those things even when it’s a big pressure kick, it makes the big pressure kick feel like any other kick.”

With the Super Bowl being played indoors this year at the Superdome, you might think that would make things easier for a kicker, but Butker pointed out that there’s actually a lot that he’ll have to take into consideration. 

“The biggest difference for me is going from grass to turf,” Butker said of kicking indoors. “Every surface is going to cause your plant to sink a different amount, so some turfs you might sink a lot, some turfs you don’t sink a lot. Some grass is super hard, so you don’t sink, so that affects your swing a little bit. There are a couple of other things that turf maybe effects, but it’s nice not having to deal with any sun or shadows, not having to deal with wind, your kicking in room temperature conditions, so all of those things are plusses and makes my life a little bit easier.”

This is a stadium that both kickers are mostly unfamiliar with. Butker has one career field goal in the Superdome, but that came from just 22 yards. Elliott also has one career attempt at the Superdome, which was a 60-yard miss back in Week 3. However, don’t expect him to miss on Sunday. Elliott is 5 of 5 on field goals in his Super Bowl career, which puts him in a tie with Ray Wersching for the most field goal attempts in Super Bowl history without a miss. 

Butker also owns a few records himself: He has the most career field goals in Super Bowl history (9) and the longest kick in Super Bowl history (57), which came last season in Kansas City’s 25-22 win over the San Francisco 49ers. 

These two kickers have already made Super Bowl history and it’s safe to say that one of them might end up etching their name in the NFL history book with a game-winning kick in Super Bowl LIX.