There was apparently a team in the NFL willing to make a gimmick of Carli Lloyd, to give the soccer star a chance to kick in Thursday’s preseason finale (which would raise the number of reasons to watch them to one).
But if Lloyd’s going to do this, she’s going to take it seriously.
Via Graham Hays of espnW.com, Lloyd’s manager James Galanis said if the two-time World Cup champion and two-time FIFA women’s player of the year was going to pursue an NFL job, she was going to spend the next few months preparing for a bid in the 2020 offseason.
“If she’s going to do this, she’ll do it -- she’ll train in the offseason, she’ll get herself ready so that she just doesn’t do it for the sake of doing it,” Galanis said. “If she’s going to do it, she’s going to do it so that she can be a success.”
Lloyd made an appearance at a Ravens-Eagles joint practice, and went viral when she hit a 55-yard field goal through a narrow set of uprights. But she did so with a five-step running start at the kick, and Galanis said part of her work would be getting accustomed to the shorter two-step approach most NFL kickers take.
“We’ll try kicking balls with a couple of steps,” Galanis said. “And if her range is still the same . . . then that’s an important piece we knocked over because we’ll know that she can kick the ball 55 yards with two steps, the same way an NFL player could.
“Once we knock that over, we’ll contact one of the NFL teams and tell them that we’re interested and we’d like to come down and spend some time with their field goal-kicking coaches and let them make some tweaks and fix her technique or adjust her technique. From there, bring in the team, and she can do it live at training in kind of like a realistic situation.”
Lloyd sent Galanis a screen shot of a text from an NFL General Manager offering a chance to kick in a game Thursday, one of two teams she’s had contact with.
Lloyd will be 38 when NFL teams open camp next year, so the clock is ticking if she wants to give this a try. Thursday wasn’t the right time since the U.S. women’s national team plays against Portugal the same night. And she’s said in the past she hoped to play soccer through the 2020 Olympics (to try for a third gold medal), but if that doesn’t happen, she might have a chance to break another barrier.