That Pittsburgh Steelers K Chris Boswell has had two bad seasons in his career still seems to be incomprehensible. Take out the 2018 and 2021 seasons and he has made 180 of his career 197 field goal attempts, a 91.4 percent accuracy rate.
That would be the best in NFL history if you could remove a big chunk of somebody’s career. But of course, you can’t, so instead of averaging 91.4 percent, he’s averaging just 86.9 percent—still the seventh-best percentage in NFL history, according to Pro Football Reference, from which database all the numbers in this article are derived.
But where he stands at the top in accuracy is on long field goals of 50 yards or more. You may have thought that the Baltimore Ravens’ Justin Tucker would be on the top of that list, as he is for overall field goals. But he’s not. Among all kickers who have attempted 10 or more field goals of 50-plus yards, nobody has made a higher percentage than Boswell’s 82.4.
The nine-year veteran has been good on 28 of 34 career field goals of 50-plus yards. While plenty of kickers have successfully converted more attempts from that distance, nobody has been as consistently accurate.
In fact, few kickers with a similar or greater volume of long field goal attempts even come particularly close. For comparison, Tucker has been good on 69.9 percent of his long field goal attempts, making 58 of 83 over the course of his career. That’s extremely good, and sheer volume comes into play, but it’s nowhere near 82.4 percent.
The closest would be Stephen Gostkowski, who successfully converted 33 of 43 attempts for a 76.7-percent accuracy rate. And the long field goal GOAT, Matt Prater, converted 74.7 percent of his attempts. That’s very impressive when you consider he attempted 99 of them—but somewhat less impressive when you remember that he played at high elevation for a good chunk of his career.
In other words, Boswell is pretty damn good at it, and there’s a reason the Steelers have been challenging him to do it more and more. From 2015 through 2020, he never attempted more than four field goals of 50-plus yards. Then he attempted nine in 2021, making eight of them, and then making seven of nine in 2022. So far this season, he has been perfect on four attempts.
In fact, he has been perfect on all 11 of his attempts, one of only five kickers to have a clean sheet through seven weeks. And two of them have missed an extra point, so he is actually one of three if you include all kick attempts.
He also has the third-most field goals of 50-plus yards this year, tied with Jake Elliott of the Philadelphia Eagles, who made four on five attempts. The Cleveland Browns’ Dustin Hopkins is a perfect seven for seven, while Matt Gay of the Indianapolis Colts has made five of six. The former is 22 for 37 overall in his career (59.5 percent), while the former is 22 for 29 (75.9 percent). Both are playing catch-up to Boswell.
