Jake Elliott Has Been Model of Consistency

Eagles kicker has made all his field goal tries this season with just two missed PATs

USA Today

Nobody ever wants to talk to a kicker, unless he misses an important kick or hits a game-winner, that is.

So Jake Elliott walks around the Eagles locker room with relative ease, unfettered by tailgating reporters looking for answers to their questions. There is no collection of media assembled at his locker waiting with their notebooks, recorders and cameras.

The reason is that Elliott hasn’t missed an important kick, nor has he made any game winners, yet.

All Elliott has been is consistent, consistently good, really.

Elliott has been perfect on all 12 of his field goal attempts this season. Twelve attempts isn’t many compared to most kickers in the league, but some of that has to do with the Eagles’ being the eighth best team in the NFL in red zone offensive efficiency. They convert touchdowns 63.3 percent of the time inside an opponent’s red zone.

Until the last two games, Elliott had been perfect on both field goals and PATs, but he has missed one PAT in each of his past two games. The misses, though, did not impact the outcome of either game.

The point after has always been Elliott’s Achilles.

In his two-plus years with the Eagles, he is 92-for-98 on PATs. Six misses aren’t terrible considering the new PAT is now, in essence, a 33-yard field goal after the league decided move the ball back to the 15-yard line for PATs back in 2015.

Through eight weeks of the NFL season – the halfway point – there were 121 missed kicks, including field goal attempts and extra-point attempts combined. That is 12 more missed through eight weeks than in any other season of the last 25 years.

There were 31 missed PATs at the halfway point of the league season.

There has been an increase in missed field goals, with 90 of them. Of those, 35 were from 50 yards or longer.

Elliott has only attempted one kick this season from beyond 50 yards. He drilled a 53-yard kick in a loss at Minnesota.

In his career, Elliott has made 8-of-12 from 50-plus yards. He made a team-record five from that distance in 2017.

His most memorable, of course, was the 61-yard boot he connected on against the New York Giants in Week Two of the 2017 season as time expired, giving the Eagles a 27-24 win and jumpstarting a year that ended with the Super Bowl LII title.

The kick was the longest in the team’s regular-season history and came in just Elliott’s second game with the Eagles after they had signed him from the practice squad of the Cincinnati Bengals

In the playoffs later that same season, Elliott made the longest postseason kick in team history with a 53-yard in a 15-10 win over the Atlanta Falcons.

Elliott made the two longest field goal kicks by a rookie in Super Bowl history in the win over the New England Patriots, connecting from 43 and 46 yards. The 46-yarder came in the final two minutes and gave the Eagles some breathing room at 41-33.

A time will likely come over the second half of the season that Elliott will be asked some questions – the Eagles hope it is only because he made a kick to win a game, not the other way around.