Four-point kicks would just complicate NFL coaching decisions

Brandon Aubrey does not need extra points to prove his leg is a weapon.

The Dallas kicker already treats 60-yard tries like routine business, and that track record is a big reason the NFL keeps circling an idea that nobody in Frisco actually asked for.

ESPN’s Michael DiRocco looked into whether the league should start handing out four points for field goals of 60 yards or more, the same wrinkle the UFL adopted this year.

Right now the NFL competition committee has no real plan on the table.

But some current players and a few Hall of Famers have thoughts, and their opinions land all over the map.

Dallas became the highest-paid kicker in the league this offseason, and that deal alone tells you teams already pay a premium for a big leg.

Add a bonus point for anything past 60 yards and a front office might start building its whole kicking game plan around one guy’s range instead of the offense in front of him.

Aubrey himself sounds torn on the whole thing.

Even Aubrey isn’t sure this is a good idea

“I think it’s a little weird,” he said. He explained the rule “kind of incentivizes you to stall the drive in a certain spot” and admitted it “makes you really, really question your playcalling around that 50-yard line area.”

He added it could add value for kickers with a strong leg but “kind of perverses the incentives of football where the goal is to get it as close to the other person’s half as possible.”

Aubrey’s bottom line kinda has a little for everybody.

“I’m conflicted on it,” he said. “I like it for the kickers. I think it’s a nightmare for the playcallers.”

That last line says it all. Coaches already juggle down and distance, clock management, matchups and injury reports on every single drive.

Tossing in a math problem about whether to stop the offense early just to set up a bonus point turns a simple decision into a spreadsheet exercise.

Football already tried this and walked away from it

Here’s the part that makes this whole debate feel unnecessary.

Field goals were not always worth three points.

Representatives from schools including Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia met back in 1876 to write the rules of American football, and a field goal originally counted for five points.

That number dropped to four in 1904, then settled at three in 1909. The sport already ran this experiment more than a century ago and moved past it for a reason.

Kickers have also gotten dramatically better at their job, which makes the whole four-point push feel like a solution chasing a problem that solved itself.

League-wide accuracy climbed from 69.7 percent in the 1980s to 83.9 percent in the 2010s, and from 2020 through 2025 kickers have connected on 85 percent of their attempts.

Long kicks are not the rare event they used to be.

The record holder still isn’t fully convinced

Jacksonville’s Cam Little, who owns the longest field goal in NFL history, is not fully sold either.

“It adds an element to the game that if you have a bigger leg, it helps you,” he said. That’s true, but it’s also proof the rule mostly rewards a skill teams are already paying for.

Dallas and the rest of the league do not need another layer stacked on top of situational football.

Kickers keep getting more reliable on their own, and coaches have enough to think about without a bonus-point clock ticking in the back of their heads every time a drive crosses midfield.

Key takeaways

• Brandon Aubrey called the four-point idea a nightmare for playcallers even though he likes it for kickers
• Field goals were worth five points in 1876 and four points in 1904 before settling at three in 1909
• Kicker accuracy has climbed for decades, making long field goals far less rare than the rule assumes