The Jaguars are changing kickers yet again. Jacksonville is releasing veteran Stephen Hauschka and replacing him by promoting Jon Brown from the practice squad, Field Yates of ESPN.com tweets.
Incredibly, this will now be the Jag’s fifth kicker of the season after regular placekicker Josh Lambo went down with a hip injury that landed him on injured reserve. Fortunately head coach Doug Marrone said the team is hoping Lambo will be ready for the team’s Week 7 game against the Chargers, so Brown might only end up filling in for one week.
Hauschka, the former Seahawks and Bills kicker, was signed back on September 28th. Despite a great deal of past experience and success Hauschka didn’t pan out in Jacksonville, and he had a disastrous game against the Texans yesterday.
He missed both of his field goal attempts, including shanking a 24-yarder and coming up short on a 49-yarder. Former Giants kicker Aldrick Rosas filled in for an injured Hauschka in Week 4 against the Bengals and played well, before landing back on the practice squad injured list with an injury of his own. Brandon Wright was briefly the kicker before he was waived after coming down with a groin injury.
Brown is a 2016 UDFA who originally played soccer at Kentucky before switching to football at Louisville. Brown has spent offseason time with the Bengals and 49ers, but has never kicked in a regular season NFL game. We don’t know what the heck is going on with Jacksonville’s special teams units right now, but hopefully Brown is able to avoid injury.
Jacksonville is the first team in NFL history to lose three straight games to previously winless teams.
Cut the kicker…….
We know the Jags are bad because they made the Texans the only winless team to ever be favored by as much as 6.5 points. In 2004 the 0-4 Bills were 4.5 point favorites against the 0-5 Dolphins but it’s rare to see winless teams favored at all.
If your kicker shanks a 24-yarder, he deserves to get immediately cut. Hauschka was once a dependable kicker for Seattle, but is clearly done. Hopefully he can exit the building without running into the wall.
As for Jacksonville, I know it’s easy to beat the dead horse, but they’re clearly rebuilding and going to struggle. Jack and Henderson are injured, so the defense was bound to struggle. If we’re looking for positives, Minshew and Robinson look fairly promising
Kickers are clearly the Rodney Dangerfields of sports. They are held to a standard where anything less than perfection is not considered acceptable.
A 24-yard field goal should be money for an NFL-caliber kicker. If it were an isolated occurence I could give him a pass, but he looked as though he was lacking in leg strength on that 49-yarder as well