Scouting Chandler Catanzaro
Last month, the Jets confirmed the signing of former Cardinals placekicker Chandler Catanzaro. It’s probably a waste of time to carry out an extensive review of the film for a placekicker. However, it will still be useful to take an in-depth look at his background and some of his statistics, which we’ll place into an easily digestible context by way of a direct comparison to his predecessor, Nick Folk.
The 26-year-old Catanzaro is listed at 6-foot-3, 200 pounds, and was an undrafted free agent out of Clemson in 2014. He spent his first three seasons with the Arizona Cardinals, making 85% of his field goal attempts. However, 2016 was statistically the worst year of his career so far.
Background
Catanzaro was Clemson’s placekicker for four seasons before signing with the Cardinals as an undrafted free agent in 2014. He missed 13 field goals in his first two seasons, but made 31 of 33 in his junior and senior year.
He carried that momentum into his rookie year, making his first 17 field goal attempts, an NFL rookie record. He had also made all seven of his preseason attempts. Overall, he made 89% of his field goals in his first two seasons, but was less effective last year as he made just 21-of-28. He’s also missed nine extra point attempts over the past two seasons.
Comparison with Folk
As noted above, the numbers alone are pretty meaningless on their own, but we can get a good idea of what to expect by comparing them to those of Folk.
Field goals
Catanzaro’s 85% career field goal percentage is better than Folk’s 81% and also slightly above the league average of 84%. However, this doesn’t tell the whole story.
As noted, Catanzaro made field goals at a rate of close to 90% for his first two years, but dropped off to 75% last season.
Folk’s career numbers are skewed by his early career which includes the awful 2007 season where he missed 10 of 28 field goals and ended up being released. He was much better than Catanzaro last year – making 87% - but otherwise made less than 85% of his field goals in all but one of his other six seasons as a Jet.
It depends largely which version of Catanzaro the Jets are going to get. If he can kick as well as he did over his first two seasons, then this will likely be a slight upgrade over what Folk will usually provide.
Long distance
Catanzaro made headlines last season when he did something that has only been done 15 times before in NFL history and made a 60-yard field goal:
Folk has never done that, although he holds the Jets franchise record with a 56-yarder made at altitude in Denver in 2010. That was far from an aberration though, as he made a field goal of at least 54 yards in four straight years from 2012 to 2015.
Despite having a bigger leg, Catanzaro hasn’t had as much success from long distance as Folk has in recent years. Catanzaro has connected on five of 11 from beyond 50 yards while Folk made seven of 13 in the same time period. Folk is 23 of 39 from beyond 50 over the course of his career.
Environment
You’d probably expect Catanzaro’s numbers to be better, given the fact that he plays in a stadium with a retractable roof in Arizona, whereas Folk has had to kick in a less forgiving environment.
Having said that, Folk has really struggled throughout his Jets career to maintain his level of play for the entire season, getting off to several hot starts before cooling off over the second half. His success rate in November and December is less than 74% - seven percentage points lower than his career average. This could be due to fatigue or simply a sign that he is affected by the cold. It remains to be seen how Catanzaro handles the same issues, but it’s a good sign that he’s made 88% of his field goals outdoors and doesn’t seem to have experienced quite the same level of late season drop-off.
Extra points
While it’s apparent Catanzaro has a slight edge in terms of field goal accuracy, it’s not close in terms of extra points. Catanzaro has missed nine over the past two seasons, while Folk had never missed one until this season. Catanzaro also missed four of 207 in college.
While the recent rule change has made extra points more difficult, it’s interesting to note that extra points were missed at a much higher rate than field goals of the same distance. That suggests that perhaps kickers around the league aren’t fully focused on point-after tries as they would be on a short field goal, possibly because they’ve got into the habit of taking it for granted.
Clutch
Folk earned the reputation as a clutch kicker and the “Folk Hero” moniker while with the Jets. Although his accuracy wasn’t the best, none of his misses over the first few seasons directly led to a Jets loss, although his teammates did bail him out a couple of times. Dating back to the end of the 2013 season, he had made over 90% of his so-called “clutch kicks”, placing him in the top five all-time.
That included memorable moments such as 50-yard game winners on opening day in 2011 and 2013, a playoff-game winner in Indianapolis and a game against the Lions where he tied the game and then won it in overtime.
Since then, he’s not been so fortunate. Both 2014 games against New England saw Folk falter in the clutch. A long kick with the Jets down by two as time expired was blocked in the first game and another potential go-ahead kick with five minutes to go was missed in the other, resulting in a one-point loss. In 2015, he missed over half the season and didn’t make or miss any clutch kicks. In 2016, he again didn’t really get to attempt many clutch kicks but his missed field goal and extra point were costly in a one-point opening day loss to the Bengals.
Catanzaro, however, has also had his struggles in clutch situations. On field goals with less than five minutes to go in a one-score game, his success rate has been only 57%. That’s part of the reason why they replaced him with veteran Phil Dawson, who boasts a 91% success rate in such situations over the course of his career. Catanzaro had some high profile misses last year, including a potential game-winner against a Tom Brady-less New England and a routine chip shot in a 6-6 tie with Seattle:
Had Catanzaro made those kicks, the Cardinals would have been 5-3 instead of 3-4-1 at the bye and probably wouldn’t have fallen out of playoff contention. That would have meant that when he redeemed himself with a game winner against Seattle later in the season, it wouldn’t have served only to improve his stats in a meaningless win.
Kick-offs
An oft-overlooked part of a kicker’s job is the role of kicking off. Catanzaro has a touchback rate of 55% which is well higher than Folk’s 23%. However, that doesn’t really tell the whole story for a couple of reasons.
The first is that the rules changed recently, moving the ball up and making it easier for kickers to achieve a touchback. A more accurate comparison would just cover the previous three seasons, during which Folk’s touchback rate was a more-respectable 42%. In fact, when he joined the Jets, Folk had just four touchbacks in his career and had been replaced by a kick-off specialist. In Folk’s first season with the Jets, he had just seven touchbacks – five of them at altitude in Denver. That was the year before the rules changed and kick-offs were moved from the 30 to the 35-yard line.
The other reason this doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story is that even after the rule change, the Jets were instructing Folk to kick short in an effort to try and tackle the return man inside his 20-yard line. Last year’s rule change, moving the ball out to the 25 after a touchback, further encouraged the Jets to do this.
Of course it’s possible the Cardinals coaches did the same thing with Catanzaro at times, but opponents started out at the 26.1 yard line on average following his kick-offs in 2016. That was the worst of his career, with Folk’s number typically falling at around the 22. Given that Catanzaro has that advantage of kicking in a stadium with a retractable roof, the difference is again perhaps not as stark as the numbers would suggest.
Outlook
Catanzaro will compete with Ross Martin for the placekicker role. Martin lost out to Folk last year after having been signed as an undrafted free agent. He actually outkicked Folk in training camp but then missed two field goals and an extra point in preseason. He did bounce back with an impressive 55-yard field goal in his last game though, and the Jets opted to bring him back on a futures deal after the season.
Catanzaro was signed to a one-year, $900K contract with $250K guaranteed. While that means there would be a small dead-money charge if the Jets opted to release Catanzaro and retain Martin, this likely wouldn’t be significant enough to sway the team’s decision if Martin outperforms him in camp and preseason. In fact, if anything, this merely makes it a cap-neutral move whoever the Jets opt to retain because it brings the net cost of retaining Martin on his lower salary within $95K of Catanzaro’s salary.
Conclusions
Ultimately, while the numbers tell us that Catanzaro is statistically a slight improvement over Folk in most categories, there are plenty of factors that suggest there isn’t much difference between them. Catanzaro will have to be consistent to eliminate some of these areas of concern.
Heading into this season, Catanzaro obviously has an experience edge over Martin, but is coming off a poor season. In that respect, it’s reminiscent of Folk himself. When Folk was signed, he beat out the incumbent Jay Feely, saving the Jets some money in the process. Folk, who had been lights-out in his first two seasons and gone to the pro bowl had become unemployed after a major slump where he missed at least one field goal in six consecutive games.
There was a reason for that though, as Folk had some hip issues that were reportedly affecting his technique. In Catanzaro’s case, his recent struggles seem to be more mental, although we’ve seen examples of kickers overcoming such issues, particularly following a change of scenery.
While the pressure of New York is well-documented, Catanzaro will be going from a situation where a few costly misses affected the Cardinals’ post-season chances to one where the Jets are not expected to contend and therefore it could be some time before he’ll face many high-pressure kicks. That time could be exactly what he needs to rediscover the consistency he displayed earlier on in his career.
UP NEXT: We’re going to take a look at Kelvin Beachum, who figures to be starting at offensive tackle next year.