Can Nebraska kick it better in 2024?

Nebraska needs more from its kicking game this year, everyone agrees, but Tristan Alvano's true freshman season was perhaps not as rough as it looked.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Kicking is tough, man. I wasn’t a kicker, so I can’t speak from experience, but you just know it is.

At the college level and up, kickers are specialists in the truest sense. They don’t look like anyone else at the office and their day-to-day duties are singular. Kickers are some combination of temp, tech guy, fixer and sniper. That ratio is always changing based on how everyone feels about the kicker at any given moment and those feelings are often based on whatever he did last.

The craft itself is underappreciated by default. Teams settle for field goals, that’s the saying. They don’t settle for field goal attempts. The 3 is assumed because drive negotiations started at 7. But, fine, 3. It’s a concession because the team doesn’t have the leverage it did when it was first-and-10 at the opponent’s 30. Just when every partisan in the stadium makes peace with taking less…look at that, the guy who only does this thing didn’t do the thing.

I don’t know how many game-winners a kicker would need to hit over his career to offset the constant, often under-appreciated pressure of every kick. Kickers can’t be replaced by AI, but we’ve always expected them to be machine-like. Which is worse? I guess the upside is good if you can deal with the dehumanizing reality of every day?

Who signs up for that?

Tristan Alvano signed up for it at Nebraska last year. The true freshman was a big recruiting get from Omaha Westside, gotten, no less, during a coaching change just a few weeks after his heroic exploits in Memorial Stadium netted the Warriors a state title.

Winning the job right out of high school remains the high point of this still-young story. Alvano took every kick in 2023, making all of his extra points but just 60% of his field goals (117th nationally). That plus two more missed field goals in the spring game make place-kicking a question mark for the Huskers entering 2024.

Since we have the time, however, let’s look at those basic numbers a little more closely. Kickers deserve it.