KANSAS CITY, Mo. — You might shrug off Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s exasperating lapses as a hiccup or a phase. Much like what universally happens with hitters in baseball, coach Andy Reid suggests.
“You get into a little bit of a funk, and that ball looks small,” Reid said Tuesday as the Chiefs (11-3) prepared to play host to the Seattle Seahawks (7-7) on Saturday at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. “And all of a sudden, you work through that. And it looks big again. And you start hitting it better.”
Or maybe it could be understood that Butker is still off-kilter from the ankle injury that forced him to miss four full games.
At his locker on Tuesday, though, Butker answered around such questions by saying he has plenty of distance on field goals and just has to make the kicks. As for the matter of whether his rhythm has been affected, he said, “I don’t know. I mean, right now, I’m just trying to make those kicks.”
Similarly but not quite the same, you could wonder if Butker is developing a psychological block that parallels the anxiety many observers have come to feel watching him this season.
Especially in the wake of his performance Saturday at Houston, where his third missed point-after-touchdown attempt of the season and career-most fifth missed field goal (from 51 yards out in the final seconds of a tied contest) could well have cost the Chiefs a game they won 30-24 in overtime.
Just the same, Butker spoke Tuesday with grace and apparent ease about his state of mind. He pointed to the importance of avoiding over-analysis and striving for the balance between tweaking and what he called reinventing the wheel.
“That’s the hard part about kicking,” he said. “You’ve got to find out what that small change is and make it. And come through.”
None of that is necessarily alarming, but none of it is exactly reassuring, either.
Because … where’s the solution in all that, even if there is an explanation?
What’s that small but profound change?
Particularly given the Chiefs’ ongoing contention for the crucial AFC No. 1 seed (Buffalo also is 11-3 but holds the tiebreaker by virtue of its victory over the Chiefs) and tendency to make every game a drama.
Speaking of drama, add to the mix a fascinating kerfuffle with longtime Chiefs punter and holder Dustin Colquitt. That’s yet more to contend with … but also to consider.
When Soren Petro of WHB (810 AM) on Sunday tweeted “Butker is officially a problem!” Colquitt responded thusly:
“Watch the holds & try saying that again…on the extra point the laces (are) facing the sidelines…(holder/punter Tommy Townsend) screwed him all year.”
When former Chief Marc Boerigter tweeted that Butker’s opening-game ankle injury could still be a factor, Colquitt referred to Townsend as an “exceptional punter” ... but reiterated his point:
“If you look back at the holds on the extra point, the #laces are facing the sidelines, and on the missed 50+ yarder he pulled the ball to him at the last second and forced the ball to go to the right — he’s been missing the spot all year.”
Colquitt’s assessment perhaps might have landed differently if extended privately by the former punter — whose candor and insights as a player I always valued greatly.
On Wednesday, special teams coordinator Dave Toub began his news conference by congratulating Townsend for being named AFC special teams player of the week and framed Colquitt’s advice this way:
Colquitt, he said, did a great job for the Chiefs and remains a fan.
“He’s a Butker fan, most importantly,” Toub said, later adding, “He’s absolutely right; there’s a lot of detail that goes into it. And it doesn’t go unknown or unseen by us.
“I don’t need to hear from Dustin to make adjustments, just so everybody knows that. We see it, we’re coaching them, and that’s where we are.”
Without specifying to what he was referring, Townsend on Monday tweeted that Reid preaches not to “listen to people outside of the building (because) they have no idea what they’re talking about. Back to work this week preparing for Seattle!”
Indeed, Reid himself seemed dismissive of the observations of Colquitt, who was replaced by Townsend after the 2019 season.
“Listen, big personality, right?” Reid said. “I mean, he loves to put his opinion out there. So I don’t worry about all that. We do our thing, we study all that stuff, and everybody’s got an opinion: I don’t worry about all that.”
Presumably by waving off “all that,” Reid means the soap opera element.
Because if the Chiefs aren’t auditing everything about the mechanics of the snap, exchange, hold and kick, then they’re blowing this off at their peril.
To be clear, there’s no reason to think the Chiefs aren’t attuned to any issues in these dynamics and exhaustively endeavoring to fix them.
When the fifth-winningest coach in NFL history says “we look at everything … there’s nothing that gets by us,” the track record backs him up.
And Toub emphasized that everyone involved is integral to an operation they’re constantly working to refine.
Meanwhile, it’s not like they haven’t had to work through this sort of stuff before with Butker and come out the other side.
In 2018 and 2019, for instance, he missed seven PATs with Colquitt as his holder (albeit in 117 attempts). He missed six in Townsend’s first season on the job, but just two last season.
In the postseason, Butker has hit 44 of 47 extra points and 15 of 18 field-goal attempts.
Saying Butker is still a great kicker and that the Chiefs haven’t lost any faith in him, Toub added, “I want everybody to relax ... He’s got pelts on the wall ... He’s going to get it fixed. WE will get it fixed.”
Toward that end, Butker on Tuesday didn’t exactly dispute Colquitt’s point when he said he’s worked the last couple years on “just looking right under the ball so that I’m not even really noticing the spinning laces, if there are any spinning laces, because I can’t control that, right? And I’d like to think that no matter where the laces are, I should still be able to hit a straight ball.”
So even if Reid resents the public flak and distraction coming from someone who played for him from 2013-19, even if the subtext might be understood as Colquitt defending his friend Butker and/or perhaps making a point about Townsend dismissing his advice, even if Toub suggested the Chiefs already were addressing the matter, here’s hoping the Chiefs are addressing what Colquitt illuminated instead of just resenting it because he did so publicly.
Because the main thing here isn’t the soap opera.
It’s solving an issue that is looming larger as the defining moments of the season approach.
Whether it’s a slump, a mental block, lingering injury or something about the holds, the Chiefs need this typically outstanding kicker to be the best version of himself again.
“Most of it’s mental,” Toub said, without elaborating on the factors that might play into that.
Like any true professional, Butker won’t make excuses publicly. He certainly wouldn’t point to issues from an injury … or directly to the holds.
“I always just take the approach of, ‘I can do better, I can fix that,’” he said. “I should be able to hit any ball through the uprights.”
The difference between “should be able to” and, in fact, doing it often are minuscule for an elite athlete.
But in a game of inches, these inches often are the ones that you can most control.
As long as you can sort out the distance in between … no matter where the data comes from, or how it’s delivered.
