Should the Dallas Cowboys keep two kickers on the final roster?

As the Dallas Cowboys look to finalize their 53-man roster they may be tempted to keep a third quarterback or even a second kicker…does that make sense?

There’s no more important position on the NFL football field than the quarterback. If you have a good one, you have a chance. If you don’t, you’re doomed. That’s why some teams hold roster spots for three or even four quarterbacks. They don’t want to be caught without one.

Besides having a franchise caliber starter, many teams want a reliable back-up on hand to fill in just in case. If it’s a proven veteran, the team won’t even have to dedicate many snaps to him in practice. Most teams also want a developmental prospect. Depending on the age of the starter, it’s smart business to have a budding young prospect waiting in the wings.

It’s these two profiles of backups that leads many teams to keeping three QBs on their final roster. Even if that depth seems better used (more utilized) elsewhere, the importance of QB is too big to not fully address.

In Cowboys Nation the same sentiment is circulating at the kicker position. If the Dallas Cowboys can solve their Brett Maher consistency issues by bringing in a close range field goal specialist like Matt Bryant, they could use Maher on kickoffs and 50+ yarders exclusively.

They’d hardly be the first team to hold roster spots for two kickers, after all.

While the logic of such moves makes sense at first glance, they are undeniable a bad allocation of the Dallas Cowboys resources.

It’s not as if Dallas has two great backup QBs they want to hold onto. They have one promising option (Cooper Rush) and one not-so-promising (Mike White). If White was cut today, I’m fairly sure no one would pick him up to round out their final roster.

Having two kickers are doubly as absurd. From an analytics standpoint, having the superior kicker rarely impacts the outcome of the game (having the better kicker rarely leads to winning). Sure, bad kicking led to losses for the Dallas Cowboys last year. But it does that for every team, just about every year.