Andy Reid tipped his cap to both his rookie kicker Harrison Butker and general manager Brett Veach in a media session on Wednesday.
Harrison Butker is having quite a first couple games for the Kansas City Chiefs. Fortunately the first-year kicker has proven he’s up to the task. Andy Reid gave a nod to Butker for his success on Thursday while also tipping his proverbial cap at Brett Veach, the team’s general manager, for being able to replace Cairo Santos so quickly and so well.
"He’s a pretty cool guy. He’s been thrown into the hopper here a little bit. Doesn’t seem to phase him much, he’s still new at it here. Up to this point he’s been pretty good. I’d probably say yeah I didn’t know what to expect necessarily other than we knew he was good at Georgia Tech and Brett (Veach) did all the homework on that, he deserves all the credit on that part. I mean he brought him here and said he was good and we believed him and put him in and here we are.”"
Butker stepped onto the roster of a winning team, a franchise expected to win most games and one that usually plays it close. While the Chiefs have been putting away opponents each week, the reality is that the league is used to the Chiefs keeping things within reach in order to triumph in the end, a tough place for a kicker to be. Butker felt that sort of close and tough competition during his first-ever game against Washington and did just fine after missing his first field goal attempts in the NFL.
Butker also stepped into the shadow of the Chiefs all-time most accurate kicker, Cairo Santos. The veteran kicker went down two weeks ago with a re-aggravated groin injury that plagued him during the preseason for three weeks. Santos returned for the fourth and final game of training camp and seemed to be just fine through the first two games of the regular season as well. He picked up where he left off last season and never missed a single field goal attempt or extra point.
Butker is showing himself to be an accurate kicker as well. After missing his first attempt, Butker has made his last 8 field goals, including five in a single game in Week 5 against the Houston Texans.
Butker came over from the Carolina Panthers practice squad after being selected by the team in the seventh round of the 2017 NFL Draft out of Georgia Tech, where he graduated as the team’s all-time leading scorer. Veach poached him from the practice squad and soon released Santos with an injury settlement. It will be interesting to see if the Chiefs want to re-sign Santos when healthy or whether those days are already long gone.