Will Reichard always shows up early on gameday to scout the field.
“Normally, I go out to the field and just kind of walk some lines,” he said in London. “So kind of going around to different spots on the field, trying to see if I were to kick from that spot in the game, where’s my target line going to be?”
Reichard usually tries to find an object in the stands, a pole or a number, to get a visual. Then, he’ll “take a couple of swings” on each side of the field. Reichard wants to be sure of his footing and sightlines.
However, he typically isn’t looking for a cable in the sky.
Maybe he should look next time.
In real time, it looked like Will Reichard toed his kick. With the Minnesota Vikings down 17-14 early in the fourth quarter, Reichard’s kick looked like it would tie the game. Instead, it suddenly lurched right, and the Cleveland Browns took over at their 41-yard line, ahead by three with 9:41 remaining in the game.
Nobody asked Kevin O’Connell or Reichard about his missed kick after the game. Carson Wentz led the Vikings on a 10-play, 80-yard game-winning drive, rendering Reichard’s miss meaningless.
It wasn’t until people started breaking down the tape of it like the Zapruder film that it became a topic. And, like the footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, it’s also inconclusive evidence.
“I didn’t notice anything during the game,” O’Connell said after the game. “That’s normally a pretty tough angle for us anyway.”
O’Connell said he typically knows whether a kick is good based on the crowd reaction. The Browns hosted Sunday’s game in Tottenham Stadium, but there was plenty of purple, enough to indicate whether Reichard made the kick.
Reichard and O’Connell thought it was a standard miss. A kicker’s motion is a little like a golf swing, where he keeps his head down initially. Therefore, Reichard may not have tracked the entire trajectory. Nobody in Minnesota’s replay booth alerted O’Connell to anything extraordinary. Had they done so, the Vikings could have asked for a re-kick.
“I did not see it in the moment,” said O’Connell. “I would defer to the league on whether that’s something that there should be some protocols in place that I should know about.”
Regardless of the miss, Reichard is eight of nine (88.9%) to start the season. He hit a 59-yard field goal in Chicago, which tied a Soldier Field record. He also converted a career-high 62-yarder against the Cincinnati Bengals before the Vikings went abroad.
Reichard said he liked playing in Dublin and London. He grew up in Alabama playing soccer and watching the Premier League, although he’s more of a Spanish soccer fan. Reichard has a friend from Hoover High School, Chris Richards, who plays for Crystal Palace in south London.
“It’s really cool to [play] in a stadium that I grew up watching soccer games being played,” Reichard said regarding Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Croke Park had extended sidelines because Gaelic football requires a larger field, and Reichard said he and the other specialists took advantage of it. The extra space allowed him more room to prepare throughout the game without crowding out other players.
“Sometimes it gets a little tight in tighter stadiums,” he said. “So, we had more than enough room to stretch, hit balls in the net, that kind of thing.”
Tottenham Stadium has NFL-regulation turf, and Reichard said it’s a good surface, even when it started drizzling there last year. Ultimately, it’s probably harder to kick in Chicago or Green Bay than in Dublin or London.
The bigger issue for Will Reichard is that he injured his quad in Week 9 last year and wasn’t as accurate after he returned in Week 14. He converted 14 of 16 (87.5%) kicks from Week 1 to Week 9, including four of five from 50-plus yards out. However, he was 10 of 14 (71.4%) after injuring his quad.
Special teams coordinator Matt Daniels believes that the physical stress of playing for Alabama, followed by the Senior Bowl, Combine, and draft process, wore on Reichard’s body.
“[If you] really look at it, I mean, this guy basically played 11 straight months of football without a break,” Daniels said in training camp. “[The quad injury] was probably due to over-kicking, over-exertion, really, just because of how much he did in January, February, March.”
In response, Daniels scaled back Reichard’s workload this season.
“The biggest thing is going into this year, he’s very conscious of how many reps we’re hitting,” said Daniels. “The distance of field goals that were hitting within practice. I couldn’t even tell you the last time we even attempted a 60-yard field goal in practice.”
Minnesota’s method has worked because Reichard was nearly perfect on the year. If only there weren’t that Spidercam cable hanging over his head, he might not have missed a kick before the bye.
