The Venn diagram of people who want Harrison Butker to screw up is a vast array of America. As Butker has kicked for the Kansas City Chiefs since 2017, he has been a crucial piece of the franchise’s three Super Bowl wins in the past five years. Much of the nation is sick of the Chiefs’ inevitability, and so the prospect of a Butker failure in a key moment has been seductive for years. Imagine the glory if he’d missed the 29-yard shortie that sent last season’s Super Bowl to overtime, where the Chiefs won.
Last spring, Butker gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas. He revealed or heavily implied a wide range of boring, nonunique, and retrograde beliefs about women and gay people. There is nothing special happening in Butker’s head, and most nonevangelicals disagree with his worldview. Butker’s speech made him plenty of new fans and plenty of new haters. It also became a mini-crisis for the public relations people who represent everyone from Travis Kelce to Taylor Swift to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. (Kelce and his brother Jason split the baby by expressing broad disagreement with Butker’s content but approval for the free exchange of ideas.)
So, this season, there are more people waiting on a huge Butker failure than have ever waited on a kicker’s downfall. Right now, Butker is quite likely the most famous that any kicker has ever been, owing to his time in the conservative media spotlight, the Chiefs’ success, and his reasonable proximity to Swift, whom he has probably met two or three times. “Taylor Swift Goes Nuts After Harrison Butker Nails Game-Winning Field Goal in Chiefs-Bengals Game,” one Sunday headline reads at Us. The headline construction reflects the belief of the publication’s editors that both “Taylor Swift” and “Harrison Butker” are useful names to place in a headline about an NFL game’s conclusion.
I bear unfortunate news for fans of other NFL teams, Swifties who resent their hero’s boyfriend’s teammate, and all social liberals with a passing interest in the NFL: Harrison Butker is never going to fuck this up. You will never get a moment to celebrate karmic retribution against him on the field.
Indeed, the Chiefs were in some trouble at home on Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals. They trailed by 2 and faced fourth down and 16 yards at their own 35-yard line in the last minute. But their problems ended the second an official threw a pass interference flag against the Bengals at Cincy’s 45-yard line. That left the Chiefs with a field goal that would be no longer than 53 yards as long as the offense didn’t move backward. NFL kickers have gotten insanely good over the past few years, but Butker has always been one of the best. There was little chance he was not flushing the now-piddly 51-yarder the Chiefs eventually presented to him. It would have been good from even deeper.
This is the cold, unsettling truth: Butker was a really grating part of the Chiefs before he became a public-facing bigot. This dude is a cyborg. He has been not far from perfect in general. When the Chiefs have most desperately needed him, he has been perfect.
Butker could have been the world’s most progressive advocate for women and LGBTQ+ people, and his shtick would have still been old years ago. In Butker’s seven seasons up to this one, he hit 89.1 percent of his field goals, third-best in the league among longtime regulars. He had a bit of a hiccup in 2022, when he only hit three of his seven tries from beyond 50 yards, but even that year, he had the longest made kick in the league at 62 yards. Last year Butker was 5-for-5 from 50-plus. Much more obnoxiously, Butker is 6-for-7 in the playoffs from that distance, showing no indication that he gets less icy as the going gets tough. Butker did miss a 48-yard field goal in the third quarter of his first playoff game, back in 2017, and the Chiefs went on to lose by a point. But in do-or-die situations since then, Butker has always done.
In the 2018 season’s playoffs, Butker flushed a 39-yarder with eight seconds left to force overtime against the Tom Brady–led New England Patriots. (The Chiefs lost in overtime.) In 2021, Butker hit from 49 in frigid weather to send that iconic Chiefs–Buffalo Bills playoff game to overtime. In last year’s Super Bowl, Butker made a 57-yarder and also did his job on three chip shots, including one on the last down of regulation to send the game to overtime. He’s had occasional misses, including one in the 2022 season’s Super Bowl, but the problem is that Butker’s misses only come when the Chiefs do not actually need him to make it. Those are arguably even more insufferable, because then Patrick Mahomes rides to the rescue and the Chiefs take on an even starker feeling of unbeatability in the aftermath.
Butker will miss more kicks—likely about one in every 10 he takes. Some will even be big ones in the final moments of games. In 2022, he pushed a 51-yarder wide right that would’ve delivered a win against the Houston Texans.
But his next truly crippling miss will be the literal first of his professional career. That Texans miss was in a nearly meaningless late–regular season game, and the Chiefs’ offense responded by scoring a touchdown to win the game in overtime. Through some work of his own and some of his team, Butker has become a Teflon kicker. He’s a star even in a world of ever-escalating kicker efficiency, and he’s on a roster with Mahomes, the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for his teammates. This means he gets lots of chances to make season-defining kicks, and in the vanishingly rare cases when he misses them, it doesn’t matter.
None of this makes it wrong to engage in liberal fantasizing about Butker’s comeuppance. Enterprising opponents of his could take active measures, in fact, to make him uncomfortable. (Pretend here that a huge chunk of NFL employees and fans do not agree with Butker’s worldview.) An opposing coach could call timeout before a big Butker kick and ask a group of female trainers—out of the house and being paid to work on a Sunday, rather than at home rearing small children—to pass out water bottles. The video board operators in a road stadium could flash a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Butker lines up a game-tying sweep of his leg. The options for mental subterfuge are diverse.
Regrettably, the reason anyone cares about what Butker says is the reason he’ll never give you what you crave. Lots of notable businessmen and politicians in the Kansas City area could give a depraved commencement address at a conservative college. Very few NFL kickers are good enough at their own job to take speaking slots away from those people. This one is.
