Kickers Cashing In

Just got thinking after seeing news that Kicker Laurence Tynes of the Giants is close to finalizing a long term deal with New York and the Buc's re-signed Martin Gramatica...what's in the future for our own David Akers?

Now this really doesn't have to do much with a contract because currently Akers is under contract until 2010, but there is some curiosity as to his performance next season.

Having been Mr. Reliable in the past, Akers had a rough season going going only 2 for 10 in field goals over 40 yards. Now out of those field goals upwards of 40 yards he nailed a 47 yarder in Week 1 against the Packers and a 53 yarder against the New York Giants 3 weeks later. Not to be forgotten was his 4 field goal performance against the Redskins, accounting for all of our 12 points in the match up.

But from that point on in the season, there's not too much to complain about with Akers because in the grand scheme of the things he is still a very good kicker, but his performance has definitely dropped in recent years.

Just looking at the 40-49 yard range, I'm going to look strictly at completion percentages because there is a whole factor of taking the offense that season into account, depending on how often they allowed Akers the opportunity to attempt a field goal.

So percentage wise, Akers had a career low of 16.7% field goal percentage for those 40-49 yarders this season. Which before, that range seemed to be a strength of his, not to an extreme but his prior career low of 55.6%, was the only real dip that brought his average from 2000-2006 to 83.3% so...in comparison, that 16.7% this year is a huge drop from an average of 83.3% the previous 6 seasons.

Now enough with the numbers, those percentages show how drastic the drop was in one area of the field, that 40-49 yard range, but I'm not going to sell Akers short for his 2007 season entirely. Looking at the 20-39 yard range, he was 100% absolutely perfect on the 22 attempts he had on that area of the field. So no one is in anyway questioning his status on this team to say the least, but there is just some curiosity as to what could be the cause of such a drop in success on those 40-49 yard field goals.

A huge factor that needs to be accounted for is the switch to Sav Rocca as the field goal holder this season. Not only was Rocca obviously new to playing American rules football in general this year, so he was adapting to punting in this league, but he had never done anything like be a holder on field goals before.

There hasn't been much talk about the issue recently so I'm not sure of David's comments on it but it's something to watch this opening training camp as Akers and Rocca get to work together some more. The only common factor that seemed to be existent all prior years was the combination of Akers and Koy Detmer on field goals, but now with Jon Dorenbos in replacement of Bartrum since 2006 and Rocca replacing Detmer after the Dirk Johnson stint didn't work out last season (despite Detmer's brief appearance on the team in the playoffs for that reason exactly), there's been some inconsistency.

Hopefully another year between the trio of Akers, Rocca, and Dorenbos (who was inked to a 5-year contract extension in December) will be a help. From the looks of things at this point, with Rocca putting together a nice season despite it being his first in the NFL, Dorenbos fitting in nicely with the team, and Akers being the consummate professional that he is, I don't see any changes in this group for a long while. Which is exactly how I, and I'm sure Rory Segrest, would like to keep it.