– For the first time since Dan Carpenter took a stranglehold on the kicking job in Buffalo, he has come under fire for his performance. Exhausted of seeing us, you know, we’ve got a kickoff guy, and we miss field goals. That on the heels of a 2013 season when he scored 131 points by making 33 of 36 field goals and all 32 of his conversions. “He hasn’t been out there, so hopefully it’s just a matter of time”. I know Percy has been pushing to play, but I’m not so sure about that.
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Practices are now closed, but Ryan wasn’t shy about talking about Tuesday’s workout, which he thought was sloppy, “When you’re going out there you’re putting in a lot of new things, it’s awesome how once you get into your game plan specific you tighten things up and then you go in game type situations like offense versus defense and they’ll forget some basic things, like snap count, so relying back on your fundamentals, alignment assignment, technique all those type of things, you have to focus and do your job, so we’ve got to get a little better at doing those type of things”.
“There’s only one person in that organization that I haven’t gotten honesty from, and that was [Whaley]”, Jackson, who is expected to sign with the Seahawks, told the News. It represented his third field goal miss of the preseason, to go along with a failed extra point conversion.
Carpenter’s cap hit is quite heavy for a kicker, and as Rex Ryan pointed out, keeping two kickers is a luxury. You can criticize me all you want about it, but I couldn’t care less. Carpenter, a no nonsense guy himself, gets it.
Carpenter wouldn’t blame the hamstring injury that sidelined him early in camp or anything else for his struggles. That’s obviously something I’ve done only about half the time. “I’m always confident. But I think it does matter that you’re confident in your ability to make cuts”. “He said he’d get me more reps and here I am, gonna play a lot in this last preseason game and that’s all I can ask for”.
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So when Carpenter’s 40-yard field goal attempt clanked off the right upright in the Bills’ preseason finale against the Lions on Thursday, Ryan was visibly disgusted. “That’s kicker, that’s any spot and that’s every single one”.
