Kicker Mason Crosby is back with the Packers for an 11th season, but the team’s decision to make changes at long snapper and punter means that he’s spending the summer making adjustments to the established way of doing things.
On Saturday night, those adjustments left something to be desired. Crosby hit 5-of-11 field goal attempts during the team’s practice and missed his final four kicks with Derek Hart snapping and punter Justin Vogel holding. Vogel said the reasons for the misses varied from kick to kick and there’s work to be done to make everything run more smoothly.
“It’s really a game of inches when you come down to it,” Vogel said, via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If I miss a spot by an inch or two and Mason thinks the ball is leaning more of an inside kick, it really could affect the kick. I mean, he on the fly was asking for some stuff, certain things because he’s experienced and [knew] what he thought needed to be done and so we made some adjustments on the fly and obviously it didn’t go the way he wanted it to.”
The good news for the Packers is that Crosby’s generally been making his kicks this summer and that there’s still a lot of time left before the regular season to work out kinks with a kicker that’s proven quite capable of doing the job over the last decade.