Rewind back to the 2017 NFL regular season. The Kansas City Chiefs entered the season with Cairo Santos as their kicker but an injury landed him on IR and he was eventually waived. The Chiefs then scooped up Harrison Butker from the Carolina Panthers' practice squad and, well... the rest is history.
Butker went on to become one of the best kickers in the league over the next several years and Chiefs fans could breathe easy whenever he trotted onto the gridiron for a field goal attempt. Fast forward to the present day, and that's not necessarily the case anymore. That was evident in Adam Fromal's latest rankings of every kicker in the NFL.
The rankings from FanSided have Butker at 17th, which, if you watched him kick last year, it's hard to argue with where he ended up. Here's what Fromal had to say:
"The mental component of kicking can't be overlooked, and Harrison Butker is the latest piece of evidence. He followed up the 2023 KVA title with two straight negative seasons for the Chiefs filled with mechanical struggles, far too many missed PATs, and a general feeling of unease when he started counting off his steps. Butker has spent the offseason focusing on dialing back his power-first approach in favor of smooth contact, but he'll end up on the hot seat if he keeps collapsing that left knee and 2026 opens with any misfires."
Latest kicker rankings won't make Chiefs fans feel any better about Harrison Butker
For those wondering how the rankings work, Fromal covered that in the intro.
"Powered by FanSided's proprietary Kick Value Added (KVA) metric, which measures how much value a kicker adds (or costs) relative to league expectations based on the distances from which he attempts. Kickers are taking and making longer field goals than ever, and KVA inherently understands those league-wide shifts to ensure value is appropriately measured. This preseason edition leans heavily — but not fully — on KVA to help shape expectations, and the rankings will be based entirely on the metric once the 2026 season is underway."
So, there you go. Butker earned his 17th spot on the rankings by being woefully inconsistent in both field goal attempts and in extra point attempts. He went 33-of-38 in the former and 31-of-35 in the latter.
Fromal's sentence about how Butker could end up on the hot seat is something to certainly pay attention to. While the Chiefs couldn't realistically move on from him this past offseason, that won't be the case next spring. Spotrac notes that the Chiefs can get out of Butker's contract in 2027 while taking on just $2.8 million in dead money. That's a significant drop from the roughly $10 million they would have incurred by releasing him this year.
In other words, it's put up or shut up time for Butker. If he struggles again in 2026, the Chiefs will have no choice but to move on from him and find a new kicker for the 2027 season and beyond. He was once considered one of the best kickers in the league but things change and Butker needs to get with the times.
Add us as a preferred source on Google