Originally Posted by
loran16
Jim, not to quibble with how good this coaching staff is, but I think you're overestimating them here. A more likely reason for the previous failures as well as more recent successes is that fg kicking success is very much random. You see this pretty clearly in the nfl where the same fg kickers get cut then do well elsewhere, sign big deals and then do lousy to start the cycle all over again.
Identifying kicking talent is hard and even the best kickers seem to randomly fail during games- take Saturday when Martin nailed an upright.
This is why big time kicking prospects fail at a higher rate than other positions - see Surgan or the many big major teams with lousy kickers.
Even Martin isn't clearly a gem just yet...duke has been fortunate enough not to need him to try a real difficult or long one just yet. He could hit a bump himself