Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker takes no shortcuts — in football or his faith

Eleven seconds on the clock at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

The Eagles had scored a touchdown five minutes earlier to tie the game. And now, as Harrison Butker sets up to attempt a 27-yard field goal, Super Bowl LVII is on the line.

The Chiefs’ kicker is a six-year veteran playing in his third Super Bowl, but until now, the world doesn’t know much about him.

A lot is going on inside that red helmet. Butker thinks about what has been a rough year and a rough game.

On his first play of the season back in September — on this very field — he attempted to bomb the opening kickoff and planted his left foot on a loose piece of turf. His foot slid, then stopped abruptly, and his ankle turned. Next, a cart ride to the locker room for X-rays. The ankle was taped, he took a Toradol pill for pain and told coach Andy Reid he was ready. A safety would be handling kickoffs the rest of the day, but the Chiefs called on Butker to try a 54-yard field goal at the end of the first half.

He delivered.

“Dirty tough,” Reid called him.

Butker sat out the next four games with a sprain. With diminished mobility and strength in his ankle, he mostly struggled the rest of the season. Among his significant misses were field goal attempts against the Bengals and Texans.

It has been a season of adjustments in technique and expectations. Butker became less proficient in kicking but more proficient in trust, acceptance and humility.

Habits had been the gravity in his world. One was kicking about 100 practice field goals and 20 practice kickoffs on a game day. He couldn’t do that without stressing his ankle, so he had to reduce his volume by nearly 50 percent.

Butker and his coaches had been convinced he would be the best version of himself in 2022. That was saying something, seeing he had led the league in scoring in 2019 and came into last season as the second-most accurate kicker in history behind Baltimore’s Justin Tucker with a field goal percentage of .901.

Butker spent a lot of time studying Tucker and trying to close the gap between them, but in 2022, the gap grew as Butker made only 75 percent of his field goal attempts.

Throughout his career, Butker had made the kinds of kicks that NFL Films would have put to an orchestral score and described with dramatic intonation. The most celebrated was the 49-yarder as time expired in the famous “13 seconds” playoff game against the Bills that sent the game to overtime.

Now, at Super Bowl LVII, he can make a kick of even greater significance. He tries to approach it like a robot, but he is overcome by his own humanity.

Butker thinks about his pregame warmup — it must have been his worst ever. He missed three kicks out of 30, three he should have made. He thinks back to the first quarter when he clanked a 42-yard attempt off the top of the left upright — that was a kick that could have changed everything.

He thinks about how Reid always tells him to live in the moment and to move on from the last kick. He is trying.

Then he thinks about the last kick he made. With three seconds left in the AFC Championship Game at Arrowhead Stadium, the Chiefs and Bengals were tied at 20. The wind chill was below zero, the wind was nasty, and the football was as hard as a coconut. When the ball left his foot, he wasn’t sure it had the distance, but Butker put the Chiefs in the Super Bowl with a 45-yard field goal.

That doesn’t matter now. His mind is a cocktail shaker of thoughts.

Tucker, turf, tape he watched of himself kicking that week.

Fans’ doubts, teammates’ doubts, his own doubts.

Cheers. Boos. Silence.

Adam Vinatieri and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Redemption.

What if he misses? What if he makes it?

It’s up.

And it’s good.

As he follows through, what looks like a small, dark brown, rectangular piece of cloth comes out of the front collar of his jersey. At that moment, much is revealed.

Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker is a creature of habit when it comes to his job, including his daily diet, weight-room routine, meticulous preparation for kicking field goals and extra points, and saying the rosary. (Cheryl Evans / USA Today)

Butker never dreamed he’d line up to kick a game-winning field goal in the Super Bowl. Never dreamed he’d be drafted.

At Westminster High School in Atlanta, he was a tuba player, chosen for the instrument, he says, because he had big lips. Being in the orchestra — he was the first-chair tuba player — would determine his life’s course. A girl named Isabelle played percussion in the row behind him. Five years ago, she became Mrs. Butker and they are now expecting their third child.

A fellow tuba player was the kicker on the football team. Butker was a central defender in soccer — he played on state championship teams in high school and was a captain twice. When the kicker was a senior and Butker was a sophomore, the kicker recruited him to the football team.

Butker kicked a football for the first time at age 16 but picked it up quickly, becoming adept at punting as well as kicking. In his junior and senior seasons, Butker was named all-state. At Georgia Tech, his teammates voted him a captain and he scored more points than any player in program history.

The Carolina Panthers had an established veteran in Graham Gano in 2017 but selected Butker in the seventh round of the draft anyway. After a training camp competition, the Panthers kept Gano, putting Butker on their practice squad. Three games later, the Chiefs lost their kicker and needed a replacement. Their special teams coach, Dave Toub, had Butker graded as the best kicker in the draft, so Kansas City signed him.

He would be the Chiefs’ kicker the following Monday night against Washington — the first regular-season game he played and the first regular-season game he attended. At the end of the first half, he was called on to attempt a 46-yard field goal. Wide left. But in the third quarter, he hit a 26-yard field goal to tie the score at 17. Then twice in the fourth quarter, he connected on field goals to put his team up by three points, including once with eight seconds remaining.

Butker was a hero in his first game and began a streak of 23 straight made field goals.

It came easily during his rookie year, but he would not take it for granted.

In his brief time with the Panthers, he learned that running back Christian McCaffrey was committed to getting nine hours of sleep a night. Butker started sleeping about 10 hours in a dark room with the thermostat set low. He wears an Oura ring to monitor sleep quality.

“If I want to be the best kicker in the world, then sleep is important,” he says. “I’m trying to find the smallest things that make a difference.”

Butker, who wore a white tuxedo jacket to the Super Bowl, says he feels “my best self” when he dresses up — and feeling his best self gives him an edge. About a year and a half ago, he started growing a beard, and now it’s a fabulous beard, long and lush and groomed impeccably with oil and wax. It balances a thick, full head of gelled hair, swept back like a cockatoo’s crest.

He eats five gluten-free meals a day, spaced every three hours, starting with a breakfast plate that teammate Matt Bushman has called the biggest he ever has seen — a large serving of white rice, as many as five scrambled eggs, six ounces of sirloin, and mushrooms, peppers and onions. On the side is a bowl of fruit.

After breakfast, his next three or four meals are identical — six ounces of sirloin, medium rare, seasoned with pepper, and basmati or jasmine rice. It does not vary from day to day, with the exception of an occasional cheat day.

“I have no idea how he does it,” Chiefs long snapper James Winchester says. “He puts mustard and all kinds of stuff on it to choke it down, but it’s pretty impressive.”

Butker even eats a meal of steak and rice at halftime of his games. When the Chiefs are traveling, the team chef, through their operations director, tells the hotel chef what Butker wants to eat and when. The hotel chef then prepares meal packets for the kicker, including one for halftime and another for the plane ride home.

If Butker didn’t eat abundantly, he might be able to hide behind a goalpost. At 6-foot-4, Butker is the second-tallest kicker in the NFL but weighs only 200 pounds. His waist size is 32, and when he’s in peak form, his body fat is about 7 percent.

“For me to have the muscle I do have, I really have to be intentional,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ll just turn into a stick basically — or more of a stick.”

Of course, looks can be deceiving. Butker is a favorite of Chiefs strength coaches because of his dedication to the weight room. His form is so perfect, he can be their example. Butker often goes heavy, with two- to five-rep maximums at 90 percent intensity.

“I love Olympic lifting,” says Butker, and probably no other kicker ever.

He loves watching tape, too, which also makes him an outlier among his kicking peers. “I’ve never heard of a kicker who watches so much tape,” Toub says.

Butker watches so much that the Chiefs’ video crew has assigned him his own cubicle in their department. He sits at a desk working the remotes for two monitors while Winchester and punter/holder Tommy Townsend watch from a couch behind him.

(Photo by Jason Hanna / Getty Images)

On the Chiefs’ practice field, he often has a teammate or coach videotape him with his iPad so he can review his form. Butker has a 15-point checklist when watching himself kick on tape.

Starting position
First movement
Body lean
Upper and lower body connection
How many frames it takes for the snap and hold
How many frames it takes for him to take his first step
How many frames it takes for him to take his second step
Positioning of the laces
Placement of the hold
Positioning of his toes and knee on his plant leg
Foot contact with the ball
Ball rotation off the foot
Slice, hook or straight
Where the ball finishes in the uprights
Is he upright or crunched on his follow through

Winchester credits Butker with changing how the snapper and holder prepare by diagnosing every detail of their operation.

“He puts his perfectionist’s mind to work and makes us better as a whole,” Winchester says. “He pushes us, always looking for an opportunity to get better.”

Butker was an industrial engineering major in college and is an industrial engineer of a kicker.

He doesn’t play golf, but he borrows technology from golfers with TrackMan, a radar system to track the trajectory of golf shots. The device provides data on the velocity of the football leaving his foot, the apex of his kick and the direction and rate of spin.

At practices and games, he sometimes packs a Thermapen to check the air temperature, which can affect the PSI of footballs. Balls typically are inflated indoors and the PSI can fall or rise in cooler or warmer temperatures. Butker needs to know what he’s kicking.

As part of his hour-long practice warmup, Butker uses a tape measure for his approach steps — he starts precisely 92 inches back and 78 inches from center horizontally. He puts a piece of tape on the axis. Then he tapes the spot 12 inches from the ball where he wants his plant foot to be. For 10 minutes, he goes over his steps.

When he’s not practicing his kicks — he usually rests his leg late in the week during the season — he visualizes them. On Saturday after the Chiefs have a mock game, Butker stays on the field, imagining running in from the sideline, what both sidelines will look like. Then he visualizes field goals and kickoffs in the stadium.

“He’s probably the hardest-working kid I’ve ever had the opportunity to play with,” Winchester says. “He just never stops working on his craft, and he is so in-depth and detailed. I’ve never been around anybody like him. We’re very fortunate to have him in Kansas City.”

When Butker’s Super Bowl moment came, he could not have been more prepared.

None of this was given to him. Unless, of course, all of it was.

Harrison Butker kicks the go-ahead field goal against the Eagles during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LVII. (Michael Chow / The Republic via USA Today)

A Super Bowl hero has opportunities and invitations. There are pedestals to stand on and lecterns to stand behind, shoulders to rub and a social media audience to feed.

“The Late, Late Show” called Butker to ask if he’d like to sit on the same couch that Kim Kardashian and Harry Styles sat on, sip coffee and tell James Corden what it felt like to be king of the world.

No, thank you. He wasn’t necessarily against it, but he had more important things to do.

Then he headed to Orange County, Calif., where Super Bowl heroes often go. But he wasn’t going to parade with Mickey and Minnie at Disneyland. He was going to pray.

St. Michael’s Abbey is a Catholic monastery in the picturesque hills of Silverado, about 19 miles from Disneyland. It is home to some 50 Norbertine priests and 30 seminarians. It was amidst chanting monks, ringing bells and wafting incense that Butker chose to celebrate his year.

“It was more to get away from distractions of the world,” Butker says of the weeklong retreat. “And to focus on what was most important — the spiritual and heavenly things.”

For as long as he can remember, Butker went to Catholic Mass on Sunday with his family. As he matured, it felt like he was going through the motions. In middle school, he was impressed by the way Muslims dressed, worshiped, prayed and fasted and considered changing his religion.

Butker eventually stopped attending Mass. Then a teammate at Georgia Tech convinced him to visit the university’s Catholic center, where he witnessed a more traditional approach. The congregants wore veils, recited prayers in Latin and knelt to receive the Eucharist. The traditional Latin Mass spoke to him, and he returned to his faith.

He understands that while football is the source of so many of his blessings, he has sacrificed much to be able to decide a Super Bowl.

Eventually, MDKeller, a holding company that he co-founded, and businesses he is involved with such as NOVUS Clothing, Phocus Energy Drinks and Shepherd’s Men’s Clothing, will be his primary focus.

“I would love to be in the Hall of Fame, play into my 50s, get a ton of Pro Bowl nods and All-Pro nods,” the 27-year-old says. “But I’ve had to adjust my goals because that might not be the best thing for my family.

“It could get to a point where because I’m getting older, I have to put in so much time to be able to physically do what I want to do that I’m missing critical moments of my family’s life. … Because of my talent to kick a football, people care about what I have to say, so I want to make sure I acknowledge that talent and not throw it away, to be a man of prayer to decide where God wants me to be.”

In the post-Super Bowl glow, he took time to deliver the commencement address at his alma mater Georgia Tech and spoke about the importance of prioritizing family over career. He pointed to his wedding ring and told the graduates it meant more than his Super Bowl rings.

Butker practices his faith assiduously, saying the rosary on the sideline whenever the Chiefs defense is on the field and holding it during interviews. He quotes saints on Twitter and prays daily in the chapel he had built in his home, reading and re-reading “The Baltimore Catechism.”

A scapular is two small pieces of woven wool worn around the back and chest. It signifies devotion to the mother of Jesus. Butker started wearing a scapular in college but took it off for games because he didn’t want to get it sweaty. After Butker sprained his ankle, Chiefs linebacker Leo Chenal, another Catholic, suggested he always wear the scapular. Butker tried it. The scapular stayed tucked neatly inside his jersey all season long, and hardly anyone knew it was there.

When Butker lines up for an important kick, he often feels he is outside his body watching himself, and then muscle memory takes over. It was that way in February with 11 seconds left in Arizona as he prepared for the biggest kick of his life.

From somewhere else, he observed.

His approach, his first movement, body lean, upper and lower body connection, positioning of his toes and knee on his plant leg — everything was right. Then he stroked the ball, and the scapular was exposed.

This is what he saw — a kicker devoted, so devoted.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic;
photos: Scott Winters / Icon Sportswire, Jason Hanna / Getty Images)