The Atlanta Falcons brought Nick Folk in to settle one of their longest-running problems, but eight games into the season, the veteran kicker has not delivered the calm the team wanted. Folk has made 12 of 16 field goal attempts and missed an extra point, leaving Atlanta back in the same search for reliability that has shadowed the position for two seasons.
That search is why his name is being checked now. The Falcons have cycled through three different kickers in 2025, and the instability already showed up in losses that turned on one kick: Younghoe Koo missed a potential game-tying field goal against Tampa Bay in Week 1, and John Parker Romo missed an extra point in a one-point loss to New England. Folk was supposed to be the veteran answer after that carousel, brought in along with Craig Aukerman in the offseason to help steady the special teams operation.
The numbers give Atlanta a reason to believe it could still work, but not much comfort. Folk has not suddenly become a liability; he has simply been less dependable than the standard he set before arriving in Atlanta. Over his previous three seasons, he missed just one field goal in each year and ranked among the NFL’s most accurate kickers. This season has already included a missed extra point that snapped a streak of 67 consecutive successful attempts, a detail that matters because extra points are supposed to be the safest part of the job.
The bigger issue is that the Falcons are asking for stability from a position that has not given them any. In 2025, Koo, Romo and Zane Gonzalez combined to make 32 of 39 field goal attempts, an 82% rate that was good enough to show competence but not enough to stop the team from changing course again. Folk’s 12 of 16 start is better than chaos, but it is not the kind of production that ends a year-long conversation about whether Atlanta has finally solved kicker.
That leaves the Falcons in a familiar spot: hoping the next few weeks look more like Folk’s previous three seasons than his first eight games in Atlanta. If the misses keep coming, the team will have to decide whether to keep trusting the veteran it brought in for consistency or open another search at the one position it has not been able to settle.
