Atlanta has an honest-to-goodness fight on its hand for the first time in years.
The last time the Atlanta Falcons had an honest-to-goodness summer kicker battle was 2019, when Giorgio Tavecchio had a very ugly knife fight with Blair Walsh for duties and ultimately both lost, with the team rushing to bring back Matt Bryant after unceremoniously cutting ties with the franchise great that February. Younghoe Koo would take over from a struggling Bryant midseason, and has held down the job ever since.
While there has been light grumbling about competition for Koo, his performance hadn’t warranted that talk aside from the natural reaction to a couple of big missed kicks. That changed in a major way in 2024, as Koo missed a career-high nine kicks and finished in the bottom 10% of the league in field goal percentage, which came after he went from missing just two field goals per season in 2020 and 2021 to five each year in 2022 and 2023. Injury played a role in those outsized struggles, but the Falcons aren’t going to just assume Koo is bouncing back.
That’s why they went out and signed Lenny Krieg, the intriguing young kicker out of Germany who will compete head-to-head with Koo this summer. Teams were in hot pursuit of Kreig after a quality season in Europe and an impressive performance at the Combine, and the Falcons signing him to a three year deal and going after him with such ardor suggests he has a real shot to unseat the team’s incumbent since partway through the 2019 season.
With Koo being relatively easy to cut and last year’s issues, I don’t think you can wave this one away. The only complicating factor, as Terrin Waack noted in the article linked above, is that Krieg can be designated as the team’s International Pathways Program player for the 2025 season if he doesn’t win the battle, which gives the team a way to keep him around (without taking up a roster spot) if Koo looks like he’s ready to go.
So who wins this battle? Sound off in the comments.