NFL Kickers Are Smashing Records: The Numbers Behind The League’s Sudden Kicking Boom
A 68-yard field goal. Twelve kicks of 60-plus yards in a single season. An 84 percent conversion rate from 40 to 49 yards. The NFL's most overlooked position just had its most dominant season ever.
Cam Little stepped up against the Las Vegas Raiders on November 2, 2025, and drilled a 68-yard field goal, the longest successful kick in NFL history, breaking the previous record of 66 yards set by Baltimore's Justin Tucker back in 2021. It was the signature moment of a 2025-26 season that quietly rewrote how good NFL kickers have actually become.
NFL Field Goal Accuracy Records: How Far Kickers Have Come in 2025-26
Kickers converted 84 percent of their attempts from 40 to 49 yards across the 2025-26 season, breaking the previous record of 83 percent that had stood since 2013. That number used to be considered the range where teams held their breath. Now it is treated as close to automatic. The broader trend backs this up: league-wide field goal accuracy sat around 80 to 85 percent through the 2000s, and has now climbed to an average above 88 percent, with elite kickers routinely hitting 90 percent or higher across a full season. Cameron Dicker of the Los Angeles Chargers became the most accurate kicker in NFL history in September 2025, converting 94 of his first 100 career attempts, a 93.4 percent success rate that puts him ahead of every kicker who came before him, including Tucker's career mark above 90 percent.
NFL Long Field Goal Records: Why 60-Plus Yard Kicks Are No Longer Rare
The clearest sign of how far the position has come is what happened from extreme distance during the 2025-26 campaign. Kickers made 12 field goals of 60 yards or longer, doubling the previous record of six, set as recently as 2022. Cam Little did not stop at his regular-season record either, booming a 70-yard field goal in the preseason, the longest field goal ever recorded in an organized game at any level, surpassing a college mark that had stood since 1976.
Analysts attribute the surge to a combination of factors: improved technique, better strength training, advances in football construction following the K-ball rule change that lets kickers use broken-in footballs, and rosters increasingly built around specialists who train year-round purely on leg power and accuracy. Whatever the mix of causes, the result is a position that used to be an afterthought on most rosters and produced some of the most jaw-dropping highlight plays in the league throughout the 2025-26 season, every single Sunday.