A 33-yard extra point is only going to be worth one point this preseason. So why shouldn’t field goals over 50 yards be worth four?
“That’d be cool. I can go for that,” Rams kicker Greg Zeurlein said with a laugh. “That’s a cool thing to think about. But no, I think it should stay the way it is.”
Likewise, the man known as Legatron isn’t crazy about the NFL’s experiment with longer extra points, which will go into place tonight and go through the first two weeks of the preseason.
“I don’t know why they’d change it, but I don’t make those decisions,” Zeurlein said, via Jim Thomas of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “We’ll see what happens. I mean, obviously if you move it back you’ll probably have a few more misses. . . .
“I don’t see why you’d want to change the game. It’s been like this since football’s been around. They don’t change the rules because quarterbacks are throwing for more yards or it’s turned into a pass-offense league. So I don’t see why you’d change it for kickers if you don’t change it for anyone else. I don’t mind it. Whatever they do, we’ll adjust. You know, go from there.”
Kickers made 99.6 percent of extra points last year, missing just five of 1,267 attempts. So the league wanted to try something to make it a little less automatic, hence the experiment.
Over the same span, kickers hit 89.8 percent of their field goals from 30 to 39 yards, meaning the 33-yarders they’ll try for extra points are only barely less automatic.