Younghoe Koo's worst kick attempt: "Kicking is one of the cruelest jobs in football"

Younghoe Koo has built a reputation as a reliable NFL kicker, which somehow makes an embarrassingly bad miss look even more shocking when it happens. Kicking is one of the cruelest jobs in football because there is nowhere to hide when something goes wrong. A quarterback can throw an incompletion and immediately get another snap. A receiver can drop a pass and make a catch later. A kicker sends one ball flying nowhere near where it was supposed to go and the broadcast instantly provides three slow-motion replays while millions of people try to understand what happened. That pressure makes ugly kicks almost painfully entertaining. The snap can be clean, the hold can look fine, and then the football leaves the kicker’s foot on a trajectory that makes everyone watching question whether the controller disconnected. Koo has made plenty of difficult kicks throughout his career, so one terrible attempt does not define what he can do. If anything, it shows how precise the position is. A tiny mechanical issue can completely change the result in a fraction of a second. Kickers live in a world where perfection is expected and mistakes become memes immediately. Sometimes the only reasonable response after a miss that ugly is to stare at the uprights and pretend the wind personally betrayed you.