The Falcoholic
The Atlanta Falcons are on their third kicker of the 2025 campaign.
Per NFL insider Mike Garafolo, the team has brought on kicker Zane Gonzalez. The veteran spent part of 2024 with the Washington Commanders, hitting 5 of 7 field goal tries and all 19 extra point attempts, but had previously not kicked in an NFL game since 2021. The corresponding move is, inevitably, Atlanta cutting ties with Parker Romo.
Gonzalez, 30, has hit exactly 80% of his field goal tries and 95.4% of his extra points for his career. His early career was defined by misses, but things stabilized after he ended up with the Arizona Cardinals in 2018, where he hit 81.8% of his field goals and was quite sharp on his rare tries from 50-plus. Gonzalez can also handle kickoffs in a pinch, something he has plenty of experience doing, but is not a high-end kicker overall. The Falcons are just hoping he can be consistent and reliable enough to be better for them than either Younghoe Koo or Romo.
Both of those kickers are waived after highly visible misses that wrecked their chances of winning a game. Koo missed a 44 yard field goal in Week 1 against the Buccaneers that would have sent a hard-fought battle into overtime, while Romo badly missed an extra point that would have tied things up with the Patriots late in the fourth quarter in a game the Falcons ultimately lost by that single point. Romo was 11/14 on field goals overall with just the one extra point miss, but as a kicker, it’s hard to survive being one of the biggest reasons your team lost a game; Romo had been on thin ice before this last game and probably should have been replaced earlier. Like Koo, he’ll hope to catch on elsewhere; he had an impressive stint with the Vikings last year and a quality summer with New England that should help him in that regard.
Give Gonzalez a warm welcome, and let’s hope he’s the last kicker the Falcons sign this year.
