Buccaneers: “Extra Points”: A Week 3 to Week 4 Review

WORSE: THE KICKING GAME

“Hey if you said kicking Field Goals and Extra Points you win!!!” Nick Folk was christened kicker by Coach Koetter after the first preseason game when Roberto Aguayo was released, and everything looked promising being very successful in the preseason and continuing into the first two weeks of the regular season minus a missed extra point going 4-4 on field goals and 4-5 (80%) on extra points including hitting a long of 50 yards.

Then came week fours match up against the Giants granted it was on a wet and rainy field but still after the Buccaneers scored an O.J. Howard touchdown in the second quarter Folk missed the extra point which would have made it 14-0 instead it was 13-0.

Then on the Buccaneers first drive of the second half they have a five play drive that stalls out at the Giants 35 and he missed a 49 yard field goal that would have made it 16-0, and then the Giants come back and scored ten unanswered points in a row to make it a 13-10 game.

Then he makes the twenty yard field goal to make it 16-10 but then of course the Giants score a touchdown and take their first lead of the game at 17-16, but after the Giants took a 23-22 lead he did come through at the end of the game to kick the game winning 34 yard field goal to give the Buccaneers a 25-22 win.

During the Giants game he was basically “Aguayo like” missing three of his six kicks (two field goals and 1 extra point) and I know that it had rained earlier in the game and the field was wet, but he played a great deal of his career in New York where it is often wet, rainy, and snowy and he had his best career percentage there finishing 82.2% so he should be used to kicking in wet and damp conditions.

Coach Koetter and GM Jason Licht confirmed that he is the kicker as they chose not to bring a kicker in during the weekly tryouts, so hopefully the game was just a fluke and he will make better then 50% of his kicks on a regular basis.

That was about the only bad thing that I could find during the game as the Buccaneers played a fairly well rounded game overall and every aspect of the Giants game, besides this one, was better then in the Vikings game.

Next we will take at look at the trends that we are seeing in the first three Buccaneers games.