Butker’s Chiefs breakout was a lifetime in the making: ‘I’m trying to be a robot’
Harrison Butker talks about kicking the way an architect might discuss floorspace. He is particular. He is precise. Three steps back, two to the side. That’s his starting point. Each step is the same. Every time.
The Chiefs’ placekicker knows what his body lean is supposed to feel like during the kick. Knows how his feet are to be positioned. Knows the specific part of his foot that should hit the ball, the trajectory the ball should take, and exactly what it should look like going through.
To emphasize these points, he keeps a notebook. A thick notebook. He’s obsessive. When he feels good, he writes down why. When he feels bad, he searches for answers, and leaves clues for the next time.
If this sounds robotic, well, that’s the idea.
“In my mind, I’m trying to be a robot,” he said. “So, OK, if someone’s trying to make a robot, to be the most consistent kicker ever, they would look the same every time. How can I look the same every single kick?”
Butker’s last game was the best of his life: two 58-yard field goals, including the game winner in overtime. Another kick to force overtime. Two more — one from 53, the other 58 — before the winner that didn’t count.
His next game will be on Monday Night Football, in one of the NFL’s most anticipated games of the year. Mahomes-Jackson will eat up the headlines, and that’s how it should be, but Butker and the Ravens’ Justin Tucker might be the game’s best kickers, too.
This is the week of Butker’s professional life, in other words, and it’s been a long time coming.
The Chiefs have employed some of the best in the sport’s history — Jan Stenerud, Nick Lowery, Morten Andersen. None ever had a day quite like Butker’s. To casual fans, this looks sudden. Kickers are anonymous between the extremes of Lin Elliott and Adam Vinatieri.
But this has been a lifetime in the making. Butker is gifted both physically and mentally. People don’t often think of kickers as athletes. People don’t often think of kickers watching film. Butker is the former, and he does a lot of the latter.
Butker was a four-year starter, two-year captain and central defender who won three state soccer championships in high school. He grew up wanting to be a professional soccer player — he leaves clues about that background in his celebrations, which we’ll get to in a minute — and was good enough for Division I programs to be interested.
But when his club team transitioned to year-round competition, he didn’t want to give up basketball and football. By then, Butker felt himself losing a little love for soccer, drawn instead toward the big crowds and excitement of football.
Lamar Owens recruited Butker to Georgia Tech (he chose Tech over Auburn). Owens remembers watching Butker dunking during basketball games — Butker is 6-foot-4 with a 42-inch vertical — and his high school football coaches wanting him to play receiver.
This summer, on a day he said the Weather Channel reported 15 mph winds in Kansas City, Butker hit from 77 yards.
“Just an all around athlete,” Owens said. “I tell people all the time: He’s not just a kicker. He’s a competitor, he’s an athlete.”
Smart, too. That stuff about becoming a robot? Comes by that honestly. Butker’s dad is a computer programmer for Truist and brought that perspective to Butker’s sports.
Whatever the result, good or bad, father and son would pause after and think deliberately: How can we make it better?
Butker is among the many athletes who reference Kobe Bryant’s influence: learn from the best, obsess over details, relentless pursuit of improvement.
“Any guy at the top of their sport, or whatever their craft is, they have to be detail-oriented,” Butker said.
Butker had a standout career at Georgia Tech. He is the school’s all-time leading scorer, a captain as a senior. He kicked a walkoff field goal against Virginia Tech as a sophomore and the winning extra point with 30 seconds left against Georgia as a senior.
The path of the kicker is never easy, though. Just three were drafted in Butker’s class in 2017, and only seven more have been taken in the three drafts since. The league provides just 32 of these jobs, and teams don’t often expend heavy capital to fill them.
Butker was the third kicker taken in 2017, going in the seventh round and 233rd overall to the Panthers. That put him in a competition with Graham Gano, who was coming off his worst season for accuracy since being released by Washington six years earlier.
But Gano responded that preseason. He and Butker performed similarly. The Panthers chose Gano and put Butker on their practice squad. A few teams reached out with invitations for him to try out, but that would’ve required Butker to give up his place with the Panthers.
By then, he’d made peace with not kicking in games that year. He and Gano and the other specialists had formed strong relationships. He felt like he was improving, and learning, benefiting in part from long snapper J.J. Jansen’s extensive note taking.
But then the Chiefs called. Cairo Santos — who, if nothing else, will be remembered as the reason Patrick Mahomes doesn’t wear No. 5 anymore — had been injured after three games. The Chiefs went through their database, going back through the most recent draft process as well as available veterans.
They didn’t have a seventh-round pick in 2017. If they did, they may have done the same thing the Panthers did with Butker. They kept coming back to Butker. His tape from the preseason looked good.
In retrospect, it’s another fortunate break for the team that’s had so many in recent years — they upgraded the position, and who knows, if Santos’ injury came a week or two later, maybe someone else would’ve picked up Butker.
The Chiefs were desperate for a kicker. They offered Butker the job, straight up, no tryout.
“How are you going to turn that down?” Butker said. “The whole reason you’re on a practice squad is to make a 53-man roster.”
When he arrived, he still didn’t know if he was up for it. Kicking can be a lonely business, especially without confidence, and especially without results.
When Butker arrived in Kansas City, special teams coach Dave Toub showed him his draft notes, which had Butker No. 1 in the class. The scouting staff’s evaluations agreed.
That helped, but not as much as hitting the game-winning 43-yarder on Monday Night Football in his career debut.
“That was the first time I proved to myself that I was good enough for the NFL,” Butker said. “Because I did it in a regular-season game, on a pretty big stage.”
Butker has been as close to that perfect robot as could be reasonably expected. He has missed just twice inside 50 yards in the last three seasons. His 58-yarders against the Chargers are the two longest made kicks of this young season, and his 90.2 percent career accuracy ranks second all-time to Tucker.
We promised you something, about Butker’s celebrations being influenced by his soccer background. When he hit the game winner against the Chargers — his third make, but the first that counted — Butker did not watch the ball go through the uprights.
He took his three steps back, two to the side, same as always. His body lean was perfect. His foot placement on point. The ball felt just as it should off his foot, and the 4 seconds or so it takes a kicked football to travel 58 yards is simply too long to keep that much adrenaline inside.
So before the ball went through, and before the officials raised their arms, Butker turned away from the field and threw his hands in the air, walking toward his teammates on the sideline like a man who’d just conquered the world. Soccer players do this, you know. They score the goal and then sprint the other way, waiting to be mobbed by their teammates.
Butker has done this before. Once this training camp, actually, he did it after kicking from 69 yards. But that one bounced off the crossbar, falling short. Oops. This time, he felt a split-second of panic. He did not hear the customary celebration.
Then he remembered: no fans.
And so he went right back to screaming, the best feeling an athlete can have, carried off the field by his happy teammates.