Make no mistake, the Patriots were in dire need of a kicker, and to address this, they took Miami kicker Andy Borregales with the 182nd pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. New England was strategic about where they selected Borregales, though, according to ESPN’s Mike Reiss.
Drafting kickers is a notoriously risky proposition. To illustrate, from 2010-16, only 11 kickers were selected through the NFL draft. Of those 11 drafted kickers, only three — Greg Zuerlein, Randy Bullock, and Dustin Hopkins — are still in the NFL today. In the meantime, several undrafted kickers have made impressive careers for themselves. Justin Tucker is the prime example, as he ended his time in Baltimore with him holding the highest field goal conversion percentage in NFL history. Players like Brandon Aubrey, Chris Boswell, Cameron Dicker, and Younghoe Koo have all followed in Tucker’s footsteps as undrafted standouts in recent years.
For this reason, teams tend to wait as long as possible before drafting a kicker. Not doing so has historically bit the teams who spent significant draft capital on the position. Former second-round kicker Roberto Aguayo only lasted one season in Tampa Bay and never kicked in the league after getting waived by the team that drafted him. More recently, Jake Moody was drafted by the 49ers in the third round. After struggling through an injury-riddled sophomore campaign last year, San Francisco brought in a veteran to compete with him this summer.
The Patriots knew they were going to add a kicker at some point in the offseason, but in the sixth round of the draft, one certain factor led them to pull the trigger on Borregales. Per Reiss, the Patriots brass knew that Baltimore was going to be looking to draft a kicker at some point to address Tucker’s troubling legal situation. Four picks in front of the Ravens, they tabbed Borregales. Baltimore ended up with Arizona’s Tyler Loop instead, who has reportedly been struggling so far in offseason activities.
Regardless, Borregales stands to be a key player in New England’s rookie class. Borregales never converted less that 80 percent of his kicks in four years with the Hurricanes, and he ended his time in Coral Gables with his strongest season. In a high-scoring offense led by No. 1 overall pick Cam Ward, Borregales did his part converting all 62 extra point attempts and 18 of 19 field goals attempts, including a 56-yarder.
For a team that, for so long, relied on the legs of consistent stars like Adam Vinatieri and Stephen Gostkowski, Borregales represents a hope that the team will return to that norm of consistency. In the years following their decision to move on from Gostkowski, Reiss points out that the Patriots rank 22nd in field goal success rate and 27th in extra point success rate. The Patriots made a move they hope will get them back on the right track, and they did it by taking the first kicker in the draft, just out of reach of the kicker-hungry Ravens.
I don’t mean to be snarky, but some of these stats have no meaning without additional numbers. For instance, a kicker might lead the league in successful kicks and also be last in success rate. It’s not likely but if a middle of the pack kicker plays with a high octane offense, he could be among the leaders in extra points and field goals in spite of having a few missed kicks. We should be told what the average is, and how much worse than the average the drafted (and Patriots’) kickers have been. Also, it’s interesting that only three of 11 drafted players from a year are still in the league. But without knowing how many other kickers who were signed and started that year are still in the league, we don’t know whether that’s an especially revealing number. I suspect it would turn out that our intuition is right, that Patriots kickers have cost the team some wins in the last few years, and that free agent kickers are just as good if not better than drafted kickers. But the numbers in this piece don’t tell more than half the story.