NY Giants: Get to know the team’s new potential starting kicker
The NY Giants made a move at kicker to replace Aldrick Rosas, but the signing is doubtful to inspire much confidence in Big Blue fans.
The last time we saw kicker Chandler Catanzaro on an NFL field he was struggling to make the NY Jets, who notoriously had a hard time finding any semblance of a kicking game in 2019, so you can forgive any NY Giants fan that isn’t over the moon about him being chosen as Aldrick Rosas‘ replacement.
Even though I was a big fan of Rosas’ overall potential and his youth, the major problem I still have with this entire situation was how the timeline played out.
If Dave Gettleman and Joe Judge knew they were going to cut Rosas all along, they made a bigger distraction out of this whole mess than there already was by waiting until training camp report day to make a move.
To say this is a lateral move at the kicker position from any pure football standpoint would be being overly kind to Chandler Catanzaro and too harsh on Rosas. While he started off his career with a bang with the Arizona Cardinals back in 2014-2015, the now veteran kicker has struggled mightily in recent years.
Yet, if Catanzaro can come anywhere close to getting the same results he achieved with the Cards back in 2015, this move might actually work out for the NY Giants.
While I was heavily in favor of retaining our 25-year-old former All-Pro kicker, he surely had his struggles on and off the field and brought this release on himself. Timeline aside, the NY Giants did about the best they could in replacing him at the moment as the options on the free-agent market were about as bleak as bleak can be.
In that 2015 season, Catanzaro displayed the type of ceiling he does have by drilling 28-31 field goals (90.3%) and 53-58 extra points (91.5%) during the first year the NFL significantly moved back the extra point distance.
Since then, however, he’s struggled to piece together consistency and ended up fizzling out badly with Tampa Bay in 2018, converting just 11-15 field goals (73.3%) and 23-27 extra points for a lowly 85% conversion rate.
The former Clemson Tiger is actually similar to Rosas in many ways, showing that he can be deadly or erratic depending on the game or season; he just never quite hit the high Rosas did in his second season and has had more time to prove himself.
Yet, the fact that he’s converted 80% or less of his field goals in 2/5 seasons in the NFL starts to take some of the shine off of that awesome 2015 season; adding in the fact that he couldn’t even make the 2019 Jets makes that 2015 seem even further away than it already does.
One positive is that Catanzaro has shown that he has a big leg with a career 62.5% conversion rate on field goals over 50 yards, including bombs of 57, 59, and 60 yards on his resume.
Again, all things considered, the NY Giants did about as good as they could replacing Rosas in terms of talent and age, it’s just the timeline that leaves a sour taste.
Many NY Giants fans and those in the media campaigned for and speculated that the team would sign former New England Patriots kicker Stephen Gostkowski, but even though he’s much more accomplished than Catanzaro, to put it mildly, I’m encouraged the team decided to go with the younger and cheaper option during a rebuild.