Modern football is full of precision plays — clean snap-to-hold timing, laser-focused field goal attempts, and strategic punts. But hidden within the rulebook is a relic from the sport’s earlier days: the drop kick.
Once a regular part of football strategy, the drop kick has faded into near obscurity, surviving today mostly as a quirky reminder of how much the game has evolved.
Understanding what a drop kick field goal is, how it works, and its rare appearances in modern play offers a glimpse into both football’s roots and its enduring creativity.
A drop kick involves a player dropping the football and kicking it as it bounces off the ground.
For the kick to be legal, the ball must touch the ground before it is kicked — it can’t be volleyed or struck before hitting the turf.
In football’s early years, drop kicks were a common way to attempt field goals and extra points because of the rounder shape of the ball. Today’s more elongated, pointed football makes consistent drop kicks much harder to execute, reducing their presence to rare moments rather than standard plays.
Under both NFL and NCAA rules, a drop kick can be used to score points the same way a regular field goal or extra point is attempted. If the drop-kicked ball goes through the uprights and over the crossbar, it counts as three points for a field goal or one point for a conversion after a touchdown.
The rules don’t distinguish between a drop kick, place kick, or a kick off a tee when awarding points — only the execution method differs. This means that, theoretically, a team could choose to use a drop kick instead of a standard place kick anytime they’re attempting to score.
However, because the technique is so difficult with modern footballs and because standard kicking methods are more reliable, teams almost never attempt drop kick field goals in competitive games.
Drop kicking was once a cornerstone of football strategy. In the early 20th century, many of the game’s biggest stars were proficient drop kickers. The rounder ball design of the time allowed for more predictable bounces, making the skill an important weapon in a team's arsenal.
As the ball shape evolved for better passing, the effectiveness of drop kicking declined. By the 1950s, drop kicks had largely disappeared from professional football, remembered more as a novelty than a competitive strategy.
One of the last and most famous successful drop kicks in NFL history came from New England Patriots quarterback Doug Flutie in 2006. Flutie executed a successful drop-kick extra point in a regular season game, providing a rare modern-day example of the technique.
Today, drop kicks are legal but almost never used.
The conditions needed for a drop kick to make strategic sense are rare: it’s much harder to control the ball's bounce, making field goals and extra points riskier compared to traditional place kicking. Coaches prefer the consistency and accuracy of standard field goal attempts, and punters rely on drops mainly for tactical punting, not scoring.
Still, the drop kick remains part of the official rulebooks. It exists as a kind of living history — a reminder that even as football becomes faster, bigger, and more specialized, some of its old traditions are still technically possible.
The drop kick field goal is a throwback to an earlier era of football, when the game’s rhythms were different and its strategies more experimental.
While unlikely to make a full comeback, the drop kick endures in the rules as a symbol of the sport’s rich and sometimes surprising evolution. For those who appreciate football’s history, seeing a drop kick executed — even just once — is a special kind of moment that ties the modern game back to its earliest roots.
