The Kansas City Chiefs have followed a woeful 0-2 start with a two-game winning streak, so concerns about slow offensive starts have — at least temporarily — subsided.
There is one continuing worry, however: the performance of placekicker Harrison Butker, who has missed at least one kick in each of the Chiefs’ four games. He has failed on field goals of 40, 58 and 56 yards. He has also missed two extra-point attempts — although one of them was from 48 yards after a celebration penalty was called.
For now, the Chiefs’ special teams coordinator (and assistant head coach) Dave Toub admits he has no easy answers about Butker’s apparent slump.
“We’re going to keep working,” he told reporters on Friday. “He did make three out of four field goals on Sunday. He made all those extra points — 13 points total for the team. Those are all good.
“Obviously, we don’t like misses. We’re going to keep working to see if we can get more consistency; he’s just in a little bit of a struggle right now. Everybody sees it. We’re just going to keep working.”
While this is an unusual situation for Toub, he believes that once Butker can turn in a perfect game, his consistency will return.
“I haven’t had somebody go through something like this over a period of three or four weeks,” said Toub. “Usually it’s just a couple of weeks — and then you come out of it. We just need to get a game where he has a clean game. Then we put another one together — and another one together — and then we just go from there.”
Toub wanted to remind his listeners that placekicking is like every other NFL play: the whole team is involved in both success and failure. Week 4’s missed 56-yarder provided an example.
“To [Butker’s] credit on that, there was a lot of pressure,” recalled Toub. “Our blocking wasn’t great on that one play — if you look at it — and I always think that adds something to it.”
Unfortunately, Toub doesn’t see a simple fix.
“That’s the hard part,” he observed. “If it was just like, ‘OK, boom — there it is,’ and then you pick it out. Even for him, it’s just something we’ve got to keep working at. That’s what we do.”
This season, the league adjusted its new kickoff rules to discourage touchbacks. If a kick misses the landing zone (between the goal line and the 20-yard line), the ball is now placed at the 35-yard line, rather than the 30. Previously, strong-legged kickers such as Butker routinely kicked the ball through the end zone without a second thought. But now that touchbacks are coming out an extra five yards, that’s no longer a smart play.
As Toub predicted during the offseason, the change has been dramatic. A year ago, team touchback percentages ranged from 24% to 84%. Through four 2025 games, they have ranged from 0% to 41%. In 2024, 67% of Kansas City’s kickoffs were touchbacks. This season, that figure has dropped to 13%.
So Butker has proven to be effective at putting his kickoffs in the landing zone — but that has required focusing on that aspect of his game during practice. Has that played a part in reducing his field goal accuracy?
“It is something that I’ve thought about,” said Toub. “How much time we spend doing that compared to field goals. But [Butker] spends a lot of time on everything. He’s a detail guy — and nobody wants to be perfect more than him.”
Still, Toub wants Butker to continue being effective at both parts of his job.
“We’re trying to work through it,” said the coach, “but we have to have those kickoffs, too. He’s really good at what he does with them. We don’t want to take away from that, because he’s giving us what we want there.”
