Acme Packing Company
I know that the Green Bay Packers’ coaching staff — whether it’s if Matt LaFleur will come back to be the head coach, defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley will get a head coaching job or what LaFleur’s potential staff in 2026 will look like — is the hot button topic right now. With that being said, one question that has been sent to me over and over, in between questions about the staff, is whether the team can release kicker Brandon McManus, who was just signed to a three-year contract this offseason, in 2026.
The answer is yes, if they actually want to. If that’s all you wanted to know, feel free to go on with your life. On the topic, though, I do want to talk about how we got here and what the Packers’ options at kicker are in 2026, including salary cap details.
After the 2022 season, when Packers all-time scoring leader Mason Crosby hit just one field goal of 50-plus yards and led the NFL in kickoffs that failed to reach the end zone, Green Bay moved on from its kicker. Crosby went on to play just three more NFL games, as a 39-year-old injury substitute for the 2023 New York Giants.
At the time, the Packers had virtually no cap space after spending $283 million on players in 2022 (second in the league, only $3 million short of the Los Angeles Rams) to make a final push at the end of the Aaron Rodgers era. It wasn’t viable in 2023 to spend on a veteran kicker (Green Bay will be under similar cap constraints in 2027 and 2028 with their current contract scheduling, even after Elgton Jenkins and Rashan Gary are released this offseason).
I don’t want to go too deep into this topic, but there were a lot of teams in the kicker market in the 2023 offseason, due to how many veteran kickers retired and/or fall off around the same time. The Packers needed to address kickers in the draft that year, but so did other teams.
The consensus was that there were two draftable kickers in the 2023 class:
On draft day, though, you saw how truly desperate teams were to fill their vacancies. The San Francisco 49ers spent their third-round pick on Moody, taking him over 100 slots above his expected selection. Ryland went 13 slots later. These were stunners.
Bad bets? Yes. Both are now on different teams, after failing to meet expectations with the 49ers and New England Patriots. A non-rational market didn’t mean that the Packers didn’t need a kicker any less, though.
So to fill the void, Green Bay waited until the 207th pick (in the sixth round) to draft Auburn’s Anders Carlson, whose brother, All-Pro Daniel, had previously played under Packers special teams coordinator Rich Bisaccia. He was the only kicker taken in the class after Moody and...
