Ranking concern on the Dallas Cowboys: Dak, Zeke, Amari ,O-line, Maher
By Reid Hanson
Brett Maher’s Inconsistency
Rationally speaking, kicker shouldn’t bother us as much as it does. Teams with the dominant kicker rarely impact a game enough to swing it in their direction. For every game won by a kicker, there’s a subsequent game lost by that kicker. And unless you have an extreme, things are generally consistently inconsistent across the league.
The analytics community has pointed out, kickers are highly volatile year-to-year (even game to game) and nearly every NFL team can point to games in which a missed kick lost them a game.
Good kickers find a way to regress and everything seems to equal out in the end so stressing about the position is pointless. Yet, I still find myself worried. It’s that anecdotal evidence that’s so hard for us fans to shake.
The Dallas Cowboys traditionally like a slow ground-and-pound approach. As we know, this reduces scoring considerably and reduces the margin of victory/defeat. Field goals just seem to matter more to teams like the Cowboys. If they had a wide open offense, it wouldn’t be nearly as worrisome.
Even with that in mind, my worries about the Cowboys kicking game are statistically unwarranted but for as rational as I can be about applying math, science and analytics to the game, I can’t help but be worried about Brett Maher losing a game because he shanked a routine kick.
Concern Level: 5/10