Can a brother get a kick?

Reggie Hodges, come on down!

At the conclusion of the 2008-09 NFL season, there were 90 kickers listed on team rosters. Of those 90 NFLers, there was exactly 1 (one) player who was black. That constitutes 1.1% of all place kickers and punters.

Currently, African-Americans compose approximately 13% of the U.S. population. About two-thirds of NFL rosters are composed of black players. Hell, even Alaska has a higher percentage of black people than the NFL kicking corps. To my mind, the scarcity of color in the NFL kicking corps is too drastic to be a mere statistical anomaly. Why does your TV screen go #FFFFFF every time it's 4th and 8?

There does not appear to be much discussion on this topic outside some dubious Canadian blogging or a few grammatically disastrous and rather impolite Yahoo! Answers pages. To me this clear lack of diversity in the kicking corps implies that there is some inefficiency in the selection of NFL kickers that could be used to the advantage of a sharp thinking team.

Through my brief research, I have found two general claims as to why there are so few black kickers:

1. black players are "too athletic" to be kickers (and thus stick to other positions on the field)
   
2. most good kickers have a soccer background (the implication being that black kids don't play soccer?)
   

To tackle the first argument, I will follow the somewhat uncomfortable a priori assumption that black players are indeed "more athletic" than white players. The idea that someone is "too athletic" to play a position (in any sport), however, is fairly preposterous. That is not to say you need to be athletic to play all positions (see: CC Sabathia, many offensive lineman), but I find it hard to think of instances where athleticism would actually hurt your performance. An athletic kicker could get a kick off more quickly, kick higher and farther, and would be more successful in running any sort of trick play.

Now the argument might be that with all this athleticism, black players are more likely to focus on the premiere positions (QB, RB, WR, linebacker) and hold their noses up whenever they walk by the kicker. However, given the astronomically poor odds of ever becoming an NFL player, would you really say no thanks to the opportunity to kick at the NFL level (with all the associated paychecks and STDs groupies) in an ill-founded attempt to make it to the big-time as a running back? If your high school coach suggested taking a few practice kicks as a way to expand your skill set and perhaps one day find a spot on an NFL roster, would you actually say no? College-level wide receivers are already converted to less glorious NFL safeties on a regular basis; is this really so different a scenario?

Perhaps your argument is that, even given a high level of athleticism, you need to have some sort of background in soccer. To this I counter: shut the hell up. If this were true, wouldn’t we see special teams filled with athletic former-soccer players born south of the border? There is, in fact, a total of 1 (one) Latin American player in the NFL. The Steeler’s Daniel Sepulveda, a Mexican American, is the second of two non-white kickers in the NFL. Sepulveda also happens to be a two-time Ray Guy award winner, selected as the nation’s best college punter. While attending Baylor, Sepulveda earned the starting kicker position despite a lack of punting experience beyond junior high. His athleticism allowed him to succeed as a punter at the college level and in the pros (see this fake punt leading to a 32 yard completion and the way he eviscerates this poor punt returner’s ego and spine – damn).

It seems to me that the lack of melanin on NFL kicking squads is most likely due to an unwillingness to look for players outside the traditional special teams spectrum, rather than any sort of indictment of blacks or Latin Americans as punters and kickers. So please – if you want to see improved special teams play on your favorite local football club, encourage the head coach to experiment with player selection and add some color to the roster. Exploiting inefficiencies in the roster construction of your opponents may just help you win your next game. Plus, Reggie Hodges is getting lonely.

---

The full list of NFL kickers that I compiled can be found at the following Google spreadsheet. For the most part I relied on a highly scientific examination of skin pigmentation as found in each kicker's ESPN headshot (or old college team headshot in the case of some of the lesser kickers that were probably cut by week 3). If the player looked like he was half black, a quarter Mexican, or had just spent a couple hours too many at the tanning salon I did some additional Googling to determine whether that player was, in fact, of the non-Caucasian persuasion.