GREEN BAY — You don’t have to tell Matt LaFleur how razor-thin the difference between winning and losing is in the NFL.
“Oh,” the Green Bay Packers coach said Wednesday. “I’m well aware.”
And you don’t have to tell Brian Gutekunst that he isn’t especially tolerant of inconsistency at the kicking position.
“I'm probably not as patient with specialists as I should be,” the Packers general manager confessed. “I'm really not.”
And yet, despite that self-awareness, the Packers find themselves — even after having five placekickers compete for the job throughout training camp — entering their season opener against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sept. 6 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with a new kicker: Brayden Narveson.
The Packers claimed Narveson — a rookie who made 71 of 91 field-goal attempts (78%) over five college seasons at three schools (Iowa State, Western Kentucky and North Carolina State) — off waivers from the Tennessee Titans following Tuesday’s final roster reductions across the league.
Narveson takes over after Anders Carlson, Greg Joseph, Jack Podlesny, James Turner and Alex Hale all kicked at different points in camp this summer.
Carlson, the incumbent who was the Packers’ kicker as a rookie sixth-round pick last year, was waived Tuesday. Joseph, the ex-Minnesota Vikings kicker and the most experienced of the candidates, was released Wednesday after the team was awarded Narveson.
Gutekunst not only acknowledged his impatience with Carlson but told the story of his predecessor and mentor, Ted Thompson, sticking with a struggling Mason Crosby in 2012 — even as others in the building thought the team should cut the veteran.
“I give Ted a lot of credit. Certainly he was a much (more) patient man than I was,” Gutekunst recalled. “I can tell you right now there were people in the office that were like, ‘Let’s move on.’
“I'm very confident in this team and what we can accomplish, so I want to make sure we give this team every opportunity to win. There's going to be a standard that we're going to try to reach.”
Whether Narveson can help them reach that standard is impossible to predict. After going undrafted, Narveson made 6 of 7 field-goal tries in preseason with the Titans, including a 59-yarder and a game-winning 46-yarder to beat the Seattle Seahawks. The Titans, though, stuck with veteran Nick Folk.
“This is uncharted territory, I would say, that I’ve been in in my time in the league,” LaFleur said. “You just have to come in and perform. I don’t know how else to put it. But it’s definitely a unique situation.”
Gutekunst said it wasn’t simply Carlson’s 32-yard field-goal miss during the fourth quarter of Saturday’s preseason finale against Baltimore that doomed him. He said the Packers personnel staff was monitoring the other 31 teams’ rosters and when it became clear that Narveson wouldn’t unseat Folk in Tennessee, Gutekunst decided Narveson was worth pursuing.
“We were looking a lot, monitoring the league. Brayden was a kid that we liked coming out and then he had an excellent preseason there in Tennessee,” Gutekunst said. “As it unfolded and he was let go, we thought it was an opportunity to get a really good young kicker and give him a shot at it.”
While Hale, the team’s designated International Player Pathway player, is on the practice squad, he is not eligible for promotion to the roster for games unless his IPP designation is removed.
So it’ll be Narveson handling the kicking duties in Brazil.“So, we’ll have two (kickers), but right now we’re going to go with Brayden,” Gutekunst said.
What will happen a month from now? Two months from now? The Packers hope Narveson will excel and earn the job for good. But everyone involved knows that’s not guaranteed.
“I’ve been on teams in the past where we’ve cycled through a lot of guys, and that’s never a fun position to be in,” LaFleur said. “Hopefully he’ll come in, do a great job, and we’ll be off and running.”
