In early October last year, after an injury to their starter, the San Francisco 49ers signed a kicker who knew a thing or two about quick turnarounds.
The kicker: Matt Wright.
The turnaround: Wright was signed on a Monday and would suit up to play on a Thursday.
The result: Wright went 3-for-3 on field goals and 3-for-3 on extra point attempts. A perfect night. The 49ers defeated the Seattle Seahawks 36-24 in Week 6 that kept San Francisco’s playoff hopes for the moment intact.
You might see this scenario and figure that Wright did his job. And that’d be true. It’d also be true that such a quick turnaround wasn’t all that novel to Wright. The 29-year-old kicker estimates that he’s played in a game on a team he never practiced with “three or four times” in his NFL career.
“Honestly, that’s how a bulk of my career has been up until this point,” he told The Charlotte Observer on Monday.
He said it’s made him a better kicker, staying consistent internally while everything changes externally.
“But obviously,” he continued, “the goal is to be in a place for an extended period of time.”
And today, he’s closer to that goal than he’s been in a long time.
For all of training camp — and really since the beginning of organized team activities this summer — Wright has been locked in a competition for the Carolina Panthers’ starting kicker role. He’s competing with undrafted rookie Ryan Fitzgerald. The two have gone essentially kick-for-kick in their training camp practices, and each had relatively even performances in the team’s preseason opener against the Cleveland Browns. Wright kicked the first half and made his only PAT attempt; Fitzgerald hit his only chance at a field goal from 32 yards out.
When asked if there was any clarity on the competition on Monday, head coach Dave Canales said that there wasn’t, and that the plan was to “keep letting them kick,” and that he’s “excited about both guys,” and that he was really impressed with how each performed in kickoffs, too.
In so many words, the competition is tight. Wright knows that. He said he treasures the opportunity to compete for a job. That’s something that has not always been rewarded to Wright, who has played for seven franchises in five seasons.
“Obviously it’s good any time I have the chance to suit up for an NFL team and get to take meaningful kicks,” Wright said. “When you’re a kicker, it’s kind of like you’re on your own little island. So I just kind of try to stay in my own world.
“My goal is to put it between the yellow uprights, so it doesn’t matter if I’m in Charlotte or if I’m in Tampa, kicking at home by myself. Just stay grounded, stay in the same mindset, and just try to do my best to make kicks.”
From Pittsburgh, to a 40-hour work week, to his chance
To understand what’s at stake for Wright this summer, consider his path to Carolina.
His NFL life started after five seasons at the University of Central Florida. He redshirted 2014 and then went on to play in 51 games there, where he made 55 of 71 field goals and 210 out of 213 extra points. As a junior, he led the American Conference in points scored with 119.
In 2019, Wright signed as an undrafted rookie with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He kicked “well” that preseason, he said. But with one of the best kickers in the league in Chris Boswell with the Steelers at the time, he didn’t get signed by the Steelers. He didn’t get a chance elsewhere that year, either.
“I was working a normal job at Lockheed Martin and was kicking on the side,” Wright said of his year in 2019. Lockheed Martin is a large defense and aerospace company; Wright majored in engineering in college.
“They were flexible with me,” he said of his Lockheed colleagues. “But I would tend to wake up as early as I could. They would let me start whenever I wanted. So I tried to start at like 5 or 6 a.m. That way I could be done when it was still sunny out and go kick and work out and whatnot over at UCF.”
Wright didn’t log a game in 2019, but by virtue of being “ready at the right moments,” he eventually got his shot. It came in 2020, when he replaced an injured Boswell and went 4-for-4 on kicks and perfect on PATs as well in three games. That led to a chance in Jacksonville in 2021 — where he played in 14 games and went 21 of 24 — and then that experience led him to spending the next five seasons as a journeyman — someone known by coaching staffs across the NFL should kicking attrition come to pass.
It’s not always the most rewarding existence.
Take the aforementioned 2024 game against the 49ers. That “perfect” game was the last one he’d play for San Francisco. He injured his shoulder late in the game against the Seahawks on a kickoff, and the team thereafter released right and signed Anders Carlson.
Wright recovered and eventually played four other games in 2024. Two were with the Tennessee Titans, and two were with the Kansas City Chiefs. With the Chiefs, he went 8-for-9. His only miss was from 59 yards out; one of the makes was a game-winner. And yet, once Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker returned from injury, Wright was on the market again, back to being one phone call away from moving across the country and kicking on a few days notice.
“The only way to look at it is positively,” Wright said. “You get a chance, you get to go kick. I mean, I worked in a 40 hour a week desk job. And kicking a football on Sunday is a lot more fun.”
‘We’re not expecting every kicker to make every kick’
The last time the Carolina Panthers had an intense kicking competition in a training camp was in 2017. JJ Jansen, the team’s long snapper and longest tenured player in franchise history, was on that team and remembers it well.
The Panthers had Graham Gano, one the mightiest kickers in the league but who was recovering from an injury and trying to recoup from a statistical down year. Carolina also had just drafted Harrison Butker in the seventh round.
“We get into camp, and the first 10 days of camp, Harrison was awful,” Jansen said in an interview with The Charlotte Observer’s podcast, Processing Blue. “He was no good. But there were all of these soft skills. His ability to rebound, his composure, his process. You just knew he was going to be good. And we were gearing up for a playoff run, and I think our front office just couldn’t pull the trigger on starting with a rookie in that phase of where that team was.
“They both made the 53 man roster, Harrison was here for two or three weeks. They eventually put him on the practice squad, and Kansas City snapped him up within days, and the rest is history. He’s won Super Bowls, he’s made tons of big kicks.”
Jansen told this story to illustrate that there is more to a kicking competition than the ephemeral observations of camp:
Did he go 4-of-5 or 5-of-5?
Was it on the skinny posts or big posts?
How long was the kick?
“What I always say, not only to the kickers that are here but to anyone that’ll listen is, ‘There’s so much to the kicking competition that you don’t see in practice,’” Jansen said. “It’s the ability to connect with the team. We’re not expecting every kicker to make every kick. Can you miss one in the third quarter and hit the game winner in the fourth quarter? Can you go on a long streak, miss one, and get it right back? Can you have a bad game, and your demeanor stays (constant)?”
Wright has proven he can. It’s how he’s been able to sustain such a life in the NFL — and it’s an essential part of the game that he’s bringing to this year’s camp competition.
“In 2019, I was so worried about everything all the time: always trying to kick it further, always trying to kick it better,” he said.
Today, he’s learned that he just needs “to do what I do, don’t worry about what everyone else is doing.”
Such advice has kept him in the league.
And maybe, this year, it could yield more.