How Austin Seibert got his field goal groove back
NORMAN — Jay Boulware could sense Austin Seibert needed help.
A year after nailing 18 of 23 field goals — including 10 straight to open his rookie year — the Swiss Army Knife of a kicking specialist was struggling.
His punts and kickoffs were up to par, but the field goal kicking just wasn’t where it had been during his freshman season.
Seibert was fatigued from shouldering all of the kicking duties during his freshman season, and it showed.
So OU’s special teams coordinator told Seibert to stop.
Stop practicing punts and stop practicing kickoffs. It wasn’t that he would never punt or kick off in practice again, but Boulware wanted his kicker to spend the spring season focusing on field goals.
Just a couple of days before the seasonopener, it appears Boulware’s decision to cut back on Seibert’s practice routine is paying off.
“He’s doing so much better,” Boulware said Monday after announcing Seibert would handle all three kicking jobs in the season opener. “Last spring, I wanted him to focus solely on field goals and becoming a better field goal kicker for us.”
Seibert, who entered the 2016 fall camp with an injury, got off to a rough start a season ago, leaving a 53-yard field goal short against Houston that was returned for a touchdown.
It didn’t get much better from there, and Seibert finished the year without a single made field goal more than 40 yards.
“I took on the challenge,” Seibert said of handling all the kicks and punts. “It’s football. It’s what happened.”
Boulware had never coached a kicker responsible for all three elements, and he knew something needed to change to get Seibert
back on track.
That’s when he made the decision to adjust Seibert’s spring practice.
“His volume was way too high last year,” Boulware said. “(It’s) making sure that you limit the number of times that he’s out there kicking to simulate a full game … As much as I was trying to be careful and having him go on and off a day, I felt like I still needed to do a little bit more tweaking to try and help him.”
Seibert continued to build on the progress he made during the spring by working with kicking guru Jamie Kohl during the summer when Seibert wasn’t enrolled at Oklahoma.
“One of the things we wanted to do was discuss where his ball flight was heading, why was it heading that way, when he mis-hits a ball, what were some of the potential causes for it?” Kohl said. “And then try to look at it in a holistic view, how can we create a stepping pattern, a swing plane, a balance contact to be able to basically eliminate the mis-hits and try to make hitting your A ball easier?”
Seibert, who wants to model his game off of former West Virginia do-everything kicker Pat McAfee, was a twoyear starter at field Coach Jay Boulware on kicker Austin Seibert
goal kicker and punter, but he didn’t have the spot necessarily locked down entering fall camp.
OU brought in top 2017 punter Reeves Mundschau, and LSU transfer Kyle Pfau is on the roster.
But when the depth chart was formally announced Wednesday morning, Seibert was still the Sooners' No. 1 choice at all three jobs.
“Austin knows what he needs to do, and he’s in a good position to be able to do it, and now he has to do it,” Kohl said.
“It’s one thing to be talented. It’s another thing to be a performer. He’s hopefully getting closer to being able to take that talent and to be a performer with it.”