Could the Super Bowl be decided by a field goal as time expires?
It’s far from impossible, considering that multiple playoff games this year have already been decided by late missed field goals.
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And it’s happened before: a field goal at the end of the game has won the Super Bowl three times in the event’s history.
What many fans don’t realize, however, is that field goals have changed over time. When Jim O’Brien of the Baltimore Colts won the 1971 Super Bowl with a 32-yard field goal, it looked very different compared to when Adam Vinatieri won Super Bowls XXXVI and XXXVIII some 30 years later for the New England Patriots. O’Brien used what was then the most common and traditional method of placekicking, in which the kicker took three short steps backwards.
In 2024, that method of kicking no longer exists and it’s all thanks the influence of European
soccer on the NFL game.
The story of the change in NFL field-goal kicking begins with the aftermath of the 1956
Hungarian Revolution. When the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising, a 14-year-old named Pete Gogolak and his family fled Budapest for the U.S. Gogolak was a good enough soccer player to have earned a spot on the Hungarian Junior National Team.
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Yet when the Gogolaks arrived in Ogdensburg, N.Y., Pete and his brother Charlie were unable to
find a soccer league to play in. So they started playing football.
When Gogolak sent a film of himself kicking 45-yard field goals to the Cornell coaching staff after the 1959 season, they gave him a scholarship. During his three years on the varsity football team (freshman were ineligible), Gogolak made 54 of 55 PATs and still holds the school record for most consecutive conversions, as well as for career conversion percentage.
Gogolak wasn’t the first to use soccer influenced field goal kicking mechanics. In 1957, Polish immigrant
And after his success at Cornell, Gogolak became the first kicker to bring this soccer style to the NFL. Years later he told
In 1965, Gogolak jumped to the New York Giants of the NFL, which ignited an “
His success sent other teams scrambling to find soccer-style kickers. Many of the kickers they discovered shared backgrounds similar to Gogolak’s. For instance,
Yepremian played well for the Lions, and he broke an NFL record by kicking six field goals in one game. But he missed the 1968 and 1969 seasons while serving in the U.S. Army. When he returned, the Lions did not re-sign him since head coach Joe Schmidt thought that “soccer-style kicking is a fad.” Yepremian signed with the Miami Dolphins and helped them win three Super Bowls. For his career,
Yepremian’s success exposed how wrong Schmidt was. Soccer-style kicking was anything but a fad.
The success of Yepremian and Gogolak prompted more foreigners to arrive to try their foot at kicking. Most of them learned the game by coming to the U.S. to play at colleges, but Austrian Toni Fritsch took a more direct route to the NFL. Yugoslavian
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The success of these foreign-born kickers helped make soccer-style kicking the norm. And two of the
The ties between soccer and football also may eventually blaze the path for a woman to become a kicker in the NFL. Women’s soccer is incredibly popular and in 1997,
Women have proved that they can be effective kickers at the high school, collegiate, and even the semi-pro level. One day, an NFL team may also give a woman the chance to demonstrate her skill at that level. In 2019, U.S. National Women’s Team veteran
Over the decades, kicking has improved dramatically, in terms of accuracy and especially the distance from which kickers reliably make field goals. In 2023, the Cowboys Brandon Aubrey made 36 of 38 field goals, including a 60-yard kick. Aubrey came to Dallas from Major League Soccer. Aubrey wasn’t an anomaly either: the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jake Elliott, for example, also made 30 of 32 field goals, and for his career, he’s connected on 86.2% of his tries—a significant improvement over the likes of Yepremian or Gogolak. Both Aubrey and Elliott also made field goals of 60 yards or more,
Yet, for all of the changes, one thing remains constant: kickers use the style imported by Pete Gogolak, which revolutionized kicking. If Super Bowl LVIII comes down to a kick for either the Kansas City Chiefs’ Harrison Butker or the 49ers Jake Moody, he’ll take the standard three steps back and two steps over before stepping up and booting the ball like a soccer player.
Russ Crawford is a professor of history at Ohio Northern University and a football historian. He has published three books: The Use of Sports to Promote the American Way of Life During the Cold War: Cultural Propaganda, 1945-1963 (2008), Le Football: The History of American Football in France (2016), and Women’s American Football: Breaking Barriers On and Off the Field (2022).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians.