Jason Myers is entering his fourth season with the Seattle Seahawks, but he’s certainly not coming off his best season.
The veteran placekicker was just 17/23 on his field goal attempts, and while he was 44/47 on his extra points, one of his missed PATs was an extremely costly one in Seattle’s Week 2 loss to the Tennessee Titans. Myers had a streak of 37 consecutive made field goals from the end of 2019 through the beginning of 2021, but it was snapped in a Week 3 loss to the Minnesota Vikings on what proved to be a 10-point swing. When Myers missed, his misses were game-damaging. Twice he missed against the New Orleans Saints in a 3-point defeat, and he also missed on a 39-yarder against the Chicago Bears that would’ve put them up by 10 points with 7 minutes remaining in the game.
Among qualified kickers, Myers ranked 31st out of 34 in field goal conversion rate (73.9%), and two of the three kickers below him (Chase McLaughlin and Matt Ammendola) have since been cut by their respective teams, but neither of them was signed to a four-year, $15 million deal like Myers was.
Myers’ career has been defined by season-to-season inconsistency. He was cut by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2017 in part because he was just 10/19 on field goals from 50+ yards out during his three-year tenure with the team. When the Seahawks took Sebastian Janikowski over Myers in 2018, Myers went on to have a Pro Bowl year with the New York Jets — career highs in field goal percentage (91.7%) and PAT percentage (90.9%).
In Myers’ first year with the Seahawks, he was 23/28 on field goals but a worrying 6/11 on attempts from 40+ out. On PATs, Myers was one of eight kickers to miss at least four of them, but he was also among the league leaders in extra point tries at 44. Overall it wasn’t anything special in year one.
Back in 2020 we’re well aware of Myers’ perfect 24/24 on field goals, made more impressive by the fact that most of his makes were from 40+ out and not fattening up on chipshots. Then last year happened and… well… I just wrote about that, didn’t I?
Myers is entering the final year of that deal, and cutting him would save $4 million in cap space but incur another $1 million in dead money. His performance levels over his entire Seahawks career and his one year with the Jets are very much up-and-down, and that really isn’t the type of reliability (or lack thereof) you want out of a kicker who has the 5th highest cap charge in 2022.
And yet, the Seahawks seem to be backing Myers entering training camp. They had opportunities to draft a kicker with their Day 3 picks and did not. They could’ve signed Cameron Dicker as a UDFA to potentially create a Dicker-Dickson kicking duo but he went to the Rams.
There is nothing to indicate that Myers’ job is in jeopardy or that this position, which means we should expect him to finish up his contract and then enter the free agent market. However, if his struggles from last year and costly misses continue to loom large during the season, the Seahawks may be pressed into looking at other options midseason.