Six weeks into their 2024 season, the Green Bay Packers cut ties with kicker Brayden Narveson, as the undrafted rookie had missed the mark on five of his 17 field-goal attempts.
To replace him, the Packers brought in veteran Brandon McManus, who was nearly perfect down the stretch of the regular season, connecting on all 30 of his extra-point attempts and 20 of 21 field-goal tries.
While he missed a 38-yard field goal in Green Bay's 22-10 wild-card loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, the longtime Bronco was rewarded for his overall efforts with a new three-year deal worth up to $15.3 million, with $5 million in guaranteed money.
But the Packers certainly didn't get their money's worth in 2025. In 14 regular-season appearances, he hit just 24 of 30 field goals and did miss a PAT as well. Yes, there were a couple of blocks in there, but he was nowhere near the same kicker he was the previous year.
And in Green Bay's heartbreaking wild-card loss to the Chicago Bears, he missed two field goals and an extra point, which obviously isn't what you want to see in a four-point defeat. Now, did he give up 25 fourth-quarter points to the Chicago offense? Of course not. But you get the point.
As you can imagine, Cheeseheads everywhere over the last month have been calling for McManus to be cut. Truth be told, plenty of Packers fans were calling for that same thing when he downplayed the severity of the right quad injury that forced him to miss two games and clearly affected him upon his return, as he missed two field goals in his first game back.
The fact that Lucas Havrisik made all six of his extra-point attempts and all four of his field-goal tries when McManus was sidelined,including a franchise-record 61-yarder against the Arizona Cardinals, certainly didn't help his case.
Now, those looking for another reason for Green Bay to give McManus the boot have one, as an all-new metric says he was the worst kicker in the NFL this past year.
All-new kicking metric says Brandon McManus was the worst player at his position in 2025
Over the last several months, FanSided's NFL Senior Director, Adam Fromal, has been tirelessly developing a new metric known as Kick Value Added (KVA).
Here's how Fromal himself breaks down the basic idea of KVA:
"The core idea is simple: Instead of treating all makes and misses equally, KVA measures how much value a kicker actually adds (or costs) relative to league expectations from the same distances across the field. A long-distance conversion shouldn’t be weighed the same as a chip shot, and a miss doesn’t carry the same meaning everywhere on the field.
"A score of 0.0 serves as the breakeven point (pure averageness), with positive numbers indicating value added and negative numbers indicating value lost. Each miss drags someone further down, while each make (aside from the true chip shots) pushes them toward higher numbers, which is why you'll often see low-volume kickers clustered together."
While Fromal plans to apply KVA to explore the top kicking careers in NFL history, the most valuable kickers for each franchise, the greatest kicks on record, and basically every kick ever made in the future, he debuted the metric shortly after Super Bowl 60 to rank each of the 43 kickers who recorded at least one extra-point or field-goal attempt during the 2025 season.
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And McManus ranked dead last with a point total of -11.4029. By comparison, the top-ranked player on the list, Ka'imi Fairbairn of the Houston Texans, came in at 15.4259.
As one would imagine, his subpar playoff performance didn't help his cause, as Fromal explained:
"Effectively booting the Green Bay Packers from the postseason in a Wild Card Round loss to their bitter rivals, Brandon McManus posted the second-worst kicking game of the 2025 season (-5.3696 KVA) by missing from both 55 and 44 and pulling an extra-point attempt wide left from the start."
For those wondering, it would cost the Packers $3,333,334 in dead money to cut McManus, but one has to assume that option is on the table, given how things played out this past season.