The UFL cooked up something this spring that sounded delicious on paper: any field goal from 60 yards or beyond gets you four points instead of three. Extra point for a longer kick. What’s not to like? More drama, more reason to let the big-legged specialists uncork one from the parking lot.
Plenty, if you ask the guy who’d benefit from it more than anyone walking the planet.
Dallas Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey — the NFL’s all-time leader in 60-yard field goals with six, half of those coming last season — told ESPN’s Michael DiRocco that he’s “conflicted” on importing the rule. His issue isn’t the glory. It’s the math it would do to the rest of the field.
“I think it’s a little weird,” Aubrey said. “Kind of incentivizes you to stall the drive in a certain spot. It makes you really, really question your playcalling around that 50-yard line area. It’s interesting for kickers that have the leg to get it there, maybe there’s a little bit more value there. But kind of perverses the incentives of football where the goal is to get it as close to the other person’s half as possible.”
Then he served up the line that ought to end the conversation: “I like it for the kickers. I think it’s a nightmare for the playcallers.”
He’s right, and you don’t need a spreadsheet to see it. You’re sitting at the opponent’s 42-yard line. Fourth down. Under the current rules, you grind out a few more yards, make it a 52-yarder, sleep fine. Under the four-point rule, your offensive coordinator is doing arithmetic in the headset — do we lose yardage on purpose to get back to the 43 so Aubrey can swing a 60-yarder worth four? You’d have coaches telling quarterbacks to take a sack on purpose. The whole thing turns into a geometry problem instead of football.
The NFL already swallowed one spring-league idea whole when it adopted the XFL’s revamped kickoff format, so the pipeline exists. But that change had a practical purpose: more returns, fewer concussive collisions. Four-point field goals would incentivize teams to settle for kicks at midfield, which is roughly the opposite of compelling television.
DiRocco polled other kickers around the league. Jacksonville’s Cam Little, who broke an NFL record last season with a 68-yarder, wasn’t exactly pounding the table for it. “There’s been so many rule changes between the kickoff,” Little said. “I just think if we could keep some tradition to the game, I think that’s what makes the NFL really cool because we’ve kept a lot of the rules.” Washington’s Jake Moody and Detroit’s Jake Bates both expressed interest, as did Little’s head coach, Liam Coen.
The broader context: kickers are getting absurdly good. The 12 60-yarders made last season — by nine different kickers — nearly matched the 13 converted across the previous three seasons combined. Aubrey alone has six of them. The legs are there. The question is whether the league wants to build its rulebook around them.
There is reportedly no formal proposal to bring the four-point rule to the NFL. For now, it’s a spring-league experiment and a conversation piece — one that the best kicker alive thinks would turn offensive coordinators into nervous wrecks and reward teams for moving backward. The man can hit from 60 in his sleep. He’d rather they didn’t make it worth the trouble.
