Vic Fangio gave an unprompted take on the NFL’s new kicking ball rules. Eagles kickers could only laugh.
The Eagles have surrendered a 50-plus-yard field goal in each of their first five games, hence Fangio’s feelings. Several factors have played a role in longer field goals, though.
He was just two days removed from his team allowing a 65-yard field goal, the longest outdoor kick in NFL history, so maybe Vic Fangio was still venting. Fangio has been coaching football since 1979, when even an attempt from 60 or more yards was a rarity.
The Eagles were 4-0 when Fangio was finished with his Tuesday morning press conference last week in the auditorium at the NovaCare Complex, but before he exited stage left, Fangio wanted to get something off his chest. There was a lot going on with his football team, many of the storylines away from his defensive domain, but there was a big story that the assembled media and those out there in the football reporting world weren’t paying any attention to.
“We gave up a 65-yard field goal and a 58-yard field goal,” Fangio said, prompted by no one. “These kicking balls that they changed this year have drastically changed the kicking game, field goals in particular.”
He went on about asterisks in the live-ball era of baseball that should be applied to the home run kings of the early 2000s, and his sound bites made their way to social media, where Eagles kicker Jake Elliott and punter Braden Mann found them and could only laugh.
“I chuckled a little bit,” Mann said. “It’s funny to us because some people just think we’re corking bats. Everyone thinks it’s the steroid era of baseball.”
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A smiling Elliott called Fangio’s assessment a “defensive opinion,” then cited the early portion of the season and its warm weather, and the overall strength and ability of NFL kickers increasing year after year.
So, who’s right? The 67-year-old football coach or his team’s kickers? Both of them — sort of.
Let’s start with the minutiae. At the league meetings in March, resolution G-2, submitted by the Eagles, Baltimore, Cleveland, Houston, Las Vegas, Minnesota, and Washington, passed without much mention. According to the proposal, the resolution “permits clubs to prepare kicking footballs (’K-Balls’) before game day, similar to the process permitted for game footballs.”
The Eagles have a familial connection to the rule proposal. It was, according to ESPN, the idea of Ravens senior special teams coach Randy Brown, whose son, Tyler, is a special teams assistant with the Eagles.
What did the proposal change? Previously, a game’s officials gave new footballs to special teams units about 30 to 60 minutes before kickoff, and a frenzied process began trying to break those balls in. It wasn’t just feet doing the work. Teams are allowed to use brushes, towels, and water.
Assistant equipment manager Craig Blake has always been great at scrubbing the new balls, Elliott said. But with the rule change, Blake and the Eagles’ specialists now have a whole practice week to break the balls in to their liking. Neither Elliott nor Mann has a specific requirement for toweling or brushing. “I think the best way to break in a ball is to kick it,” Mann said. And Elliott: “I’m foot on ball, getting familiar with it.”
“It’s no different than how the quarterbacks get to prep theirs and use them throughout the week,” Elliott said. “They’re familiar with it. It would almost be like, going back to the old rule, the quarterback feels the ball for the first time in a game. That wouldn’t go well. It’s just been a luxury to know what you’re getting.”
The Eagles, like all NFL teams, were sent 60 footballs marked for kicking before the season. Each kicking ball can be used in up to three games before it needs to be discarded. Before each game, officials inspect the three kicking balls a team wants to use to make sure they’re the right size and are inflated to the correct standards.
“It’s the same balls we’ve been using over the years,” Elliott said. “The only difference is we get to see them throughout the week and get familiar with them. Is that an advantage to us? Slightly. Just because we know what we’re going to get and we can kind of piece it together, how we want it to look.”
But are the balls providing kickers with a real advantage? Fangio doesn’t seem to be on to a trend here. Through four weeks, NFL kickers made 73.7% of their attempts from 50-plus yards, according to ESPN. That number was down nearly 2 percentage points from the same time frame in 2024 and down nearly 4 percentage points from the first four games of the 2022 season. The Eagles, though, have surrendered a 50-plus-yarder in each of their first five games, hence Fangio’s feelings.
As far as 60-plus-yarders go, the league is seeing more of them attempted, which means more of them will be made.
Since the start of the 2020 season, kickers have made 37% of their attempts of at least 60 yards. They made 26% of them in the last decade and less than 10% of them before 2010. In 2025, they have made four out of seven attempts, or 57%. Elliott himself has two of them, one from 61 yards — a walk-off vs. the Giants — during his 2017 rookie season and another from the same distance during a 2023 home game. Both kicks came in September, which lines up with Elliott’s assessment that the long kicks the league is seeing right now are at least partially due to the weather.
Baltimore’s Justin Tucker set the league record with a 66-yard field goal in 2021. That record is likely going to be toppled, though. There have already been four successful attempts so far this season from 60-plus yards, and the record for 60-yarders in one season is five, which happened in 2022 and 2023. It is only Week 6.
“The guy in Dallas is going to hit a 70-plus-yarder this year,” Fangio said, referring to Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey, who made a 64-yard, game-tying field goal in Week 2. “You can just book it.”
Jacksonville kicker Cam Little hit from 70 in the preseason.
Elliott seemed to agree with Fangio, that a 70-yard field goal would happen in a real game soon enough, maybe even from Aubrey. But it won’t be because of how often Dallas’ version of Blake scrubs the K-balls during the week or because Aubrey and his peers, like Elliott, get to kick them dozens of times at practice.
“Every kicker in the league can kick a 60-yard field goal regardless of what the ball is,” Elliott said. “Guys are getting stronger and kickers are getting better. That’s more of it than anything.”
Inquirer data reporter Chris A. Williams contributed to this story.