Does Jason Myers pass the sniff test?

There is a quart of milk in the door of our refrigerator that should be good.

It reads “SELL BY SEP 05.”

It even lists a time: 18:05.

It smells a little funky, though.

If you’re familiar with my theory on kickers you already understand it’s not my noon-time latte I’m worried about, but rather Jason Myers.

He has made more field goals than any other kicker in Seahawks history. He converted 41 of the 48 he attempted last season, and five of the seven he missed were of more than 50 yards.

He should be good. He’s got a year left on the four-year deal he signed in 2023, the one that made him the second highest-paid kicker in the league.

I’m starting to wonder, though. He was 2-for-4 on extra-point tries in the preseason. He missed three of the five field goals he attempted, including a 52-yarder as time expired in the final preseason game.

So take a whiff of Seattle’s current place-kicking situation. What do you smell?

I believe that kickers are like milk. If you think one’s gone bad, putting him back in the refrigerator will only compound the problem.

And if you’re worried he’s gone bad, should you run the risk of losing a game just because you hope you’re wrong?

I realize my analogy has flaws.

If I decide the milk in my refrigerator has turned, I can go to the store and buy another quart, knowing with absolute certainty it will fix my problem.

That’s not true with kickers, especially not when you’re considering replacing someone who has been as good as Myers has for Seattle.

Perhaps Seattle should wait until the games matter before deciding there’s a problem.

That brings me to the second issue with my analogy.

The status of the milk in my refrigerator is utterly unaffected by any concerns that it may have turned. Me worrying and wondering doesn’t make it any more likely to be sour.

Kickers, however? They’re fickle creatures, and the last thing you want one of them doing is spending too much time thinking about why he’s suddenly finding it so hard to kick this oblong spheroid between those two yellow pipes.

Kickers occupy a unique corner of the NFL. They are exceedingly important in a league where most games are decided by eight points or fewer. A good one is exceptionally valuable.

It is also, as Adam Sandler once sang, the loneliest job.

You might be tempted to include punters, too, but a punter’s performance is open to interpretation. There’s hang time involved, and while punters are called upon to make directional kicks, their accuracy is not judged as ruthlessly as a kicker’s.

Kickers exist in a binary world: Good or not.

They are also relatively easy to swap out. There’s no playbook to learn and a limited amount of vocabulary.

That does not mean they’re interchangeable, though. Some kickers are definitely better than others, but if you need a kicker, you’ve got a decent chance of signing someone who’s league average.

Myers has been better than that for Seattle.

He first played for the Seahawks in August 2017, and if we’re being honest, he outperformed Sebastian Janikowski in training camp that year.

Seattle opted for Janikowski, who’d been one of the best kickers in history in his 17 seasons with the Raiders. Janikowski was fine in Seattle. He made more than 80 percent of his field goals. He did have an utterly embarrassingly low-effort attempt to run an opponent out of bounds on a kickoff return, though. In the playoffs, he suffered a hamstring injury in the second quarter that forced Seattle to play the second half without a kicker.

Myers, meanwhile, made the Pro Bowl with the Jets. The Seahawks signed him in the offseason, and he has been exceptional over the past seven seasons. In 2023, Seattle signed him to a four-year deal that made him the second-highest-paid kicker in the league. He has one year remaining on that deal.

You could play the percentages here. History shows Myers is a very consistent kicker, hitting 75 percent of his attempts of 50 yards or more over the past two years.

Myers missed three field-goal attempts in Seattle’s first five games last season. He pulled it together and had a hell of a season.

But in a 17-game season, you don’t really have time to let a kicker work his way through something, either.

Myers missed a total of five kicks in Seattle’s three preseason games. Three of those were field-goal attempts from distances of 45, 42, and 52 yards.

Kickers are expected to make those, and when they don’t, it starts to play with everyone’s head. The only thing comparable to a shaky kicker is an unreliable closer in baseball.

You remember that quart of milk sitting in the door of my refrigerator?

Well, I just used it to make a latte. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I started steaming the milk.

I decided to at least taste it, though. I finished heating it up, developed a nice foam, and then poured it over a spoon into the two shots of espresso waiting in a ceramic mug.

Yuck. Tasted worse than it smelled.

That doesn’t mean I’d go cut Myers right now. As I admitted earlier, there are some imperfections in my milk-and-kicker analogy.

I would be trying out new kickers, though.

And if one of those auditioning kickers performed as well as Myers during the week, well, I’d be real tempted to go with that guy into the season.

And if Myers does remain the kicker, he wouldn’t get any margin for error. Not in this league. Not at that position.