Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Hey Guys:

Who was the first barefoot placekicker in NFL history? I'm thinking that it was Tony Franklin of Philadelphia in 1979. Am I correct?

Joe Zagorski

Correct.

What was the perceived advantage at the time to kicking barefoot?

MatthewToy wrote:What was the perceived advantage at the time to kicking barefoot?

There have been several barefoot punters, going back at least to 1929, and it seems that they punted barefoot simply because they'd always done it that way and they felt comfortable punting without shoes. I can't say for sure, but I suspect the same might be true of barefoot placekickers; there's a psychological advantage because of the comfort level.

What has always confounded me about the barefoot kickers is that they appeared to be a coming trend in the 80's, and all of a sudden, they became totally extinct and never returned. It was as if the soccer style kickers totally vanished after the 1969 season and the species were never seen again in the NFL. And all the kids who watched football in the 80's, you would have thought some of them would have been fans of Rich Karlis or one of those guys and emulated him and started kicking barefoot and one or two of them would have made it to the NFL, but it didn't happen. As far as I know, I haven't heard of any barefoot kickers in college in a long time. This one has always puzzled me.

Rupert Patrick wrote:What has always confounded me about the barefoot kickers is that they appeared to be a coming trend in the 80's, and all of a sudden, they became totally extinct and never returned. It was as if the soccer style kickers totally vanished after the 1969 season and the species were never seen again in the NFL. And all the kids who watched football in the 80's, you would have thought some of them would have been fans of Rich Karlis or one of those guys and emulated him and started kicking barefoot and one or two of them would have made it to the NFL, but it didn't happen. As far as I know, I haven't heard of any barefoot kickers in college in a long time. This one has always puzzled me.

Maybe somewhere along the way the NFL decided being barefoot is a violation of their uniform rules?

If the athletes and the rules didn't change perhaps the environment did.

Maybe the advent of turf and domed stadiums negated whatever advantage kicking barefoot originally had.

I've seen barefoot kickers in major college football somewhat recently, and lower divisions this year. Have seen it in high school football in recent years also (also usually a story about a HS kid every kicking barefoot every other year - same with straight-on kickers) ...

Best guess as to why it's 'disappeared' from the NFL, the advancement in shoes/cleats.

Reaser wrote:I've seen barefoot kickers in major college football somewhat recently, and lower divisions this year. Have seen it in high school football in recent years also (also usually a story about a HS kid every kicking barefoot every other year - same with straight-on kickers) ...

Best guess as to why it's 'disappeared' from the NFL, the advancement in shoes/cleats.

My thought as well (better shoes/cleats). And I recalled something about Morten Andersen designing his own ... a $5,000 kicking shoe:

LATimes: "The shoe fits"
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-28/ ... fl-history

Though I miss the weird, squared-toe kicking shoe used by some of the straight-on kickers of yesteryear. As a kid in the '70s, I had a white, opaque, plastic matching kicking tee/kicking toe thing I bought at Sears. The kicking toe thing was something "held on" with a rubber band around the heel (not supplied by the manufacturer) to give you a square kicking surface ("held on" is optimistic, as were my hopes for improved kicking ... should've just learned to kick soccer-style like the foreign exchange student from northern Europe at the high school, who was handling kicking duties for the team and adding some international flair).

Aside of Franklin and Karlis, Mike Lansford and Paul McFadden were the other two barefoot kickers who played the longest.

As for punters, Jim Miller won a Súper Bowl with the 49ers.