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The Oakland Raiders had lost 18 of their previous 20 games against the Kansas City Chiefs, so the utter debacle unfolding at Arrowhead Stadium in the final game of the 1999 season should not have shocked anyone. Oakland trailed 14-0 before the Chiefs’ offense ran a single play. That the Raiders, under second-year coach Jon Gruden, battled into position to attempt the tying field goal with 50 seconds left in regulation was remarkable. That Oakland made that kick and the winner in overtime seemed surreal for a team that could not kick straight.

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No team missed more field goal tries than the Raiders over the final four seasons of the 1990s, so when Joe Nedney’s winner knocked the Chiefs from the playoffs while delivering Oakland its first victory at Arrowhead in more than a decade, possibly saving Gruden’s job in the process, there was a feeling the Raiders had finally found a kicker they could trust. A strong finish guaranteed nothing for Nedney, but as the draft approached, the California native headed across the Atlantic for a three-week getaway feeling he had a decent foothold at least. And then he called home.

“I remember being in Italy, sitting at a table with my wife for dinner, and after dinner, I called my parents just to say hello,” Nedney said. “It was draft night. In my head, I was a little worried, but I thought, ‘Who is going to pick a kicker with the 17th pick? The Raiders aren’t going to do that.’ And so I asked Mom, ‘Hey, what happened with the draft?’ And there was just silence.”

Who was going to pick a kicker with the 17th pick? Al Davis was who. The Raiders’ late owner defied convention in so many ways, including 20 years ago this week, when he used the 17th pick in the 2000 draft on Florida State kicker Sebastian Janikowski. It remains the only time in the past 40 drafts a team selected a specialist in the first round. Janikowski played a franchise-record 268 games for the Raiders, ending a four-year run in which Oakland ranked last in field-goal percentage while playing a league-high 22 games decided by three or fewer points.

Several factors drove the historic selection of Janikowski: a maverick owner fixated on special traits, years of kicking trauma that might have contributed to PTSD, a generational prospect in Janikowski and a draft in which the Raiders’ own scouts identified only 16 prospects worthy of first-round grades. It was a wild ride.

Jon Kingdon, former Raiders scouting exec: This actually goes back to when we cut (longtime Raiders kicker) Jeff Jaeger before the ’96 season. Jeff had gotten hurt, Cole Ford came in and made like 8 of 9. Al kept Cole the next year and from the time we cut Jeff Jaeger, we had a lot of trouble in our kicking game. It was a disaster.

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Michael Lombardi, former Raiders exec: We signed this kicker and, dangit, his name escapes me, but he didn’t just miss, they are shanking into the goddamn locker room.

Bill Soliday, former Raiders beat reporter: They had a history of strangeness when it came to kickers. George Blanda was such a hero in 1970 and then I remember they dumped him and went with some rookie who was over his head, and they wound up winning a Super Bowl with Erroll Mann, who was pretty good. But over the years, I think kickers kind of drove Al crazy in private.

Tim Brown, Raiders Hall of Fame wide receiver: It seems like the kickers we went against were always perfect in those critical situations. The tuck game comes to mind. How do you make a 46-yard field goal in the driving snow? Who does that? If the Raiders are on the field, that is possible. I just can’t remember where we ran out on the field and tackled our kicker during those years.

My best kicker story was off the field. We are in a park in the middle of Kansas City and some kind of way, our bus driver leaves. Not with the bus. The bus is there, but the driver is gone and the bus is running. So, Cole Ford says, “Hey, I used to drive a bus before I came in the league,” and we were like, “Well, hot dog it, let’s go!”

So we jump in the doggone bus and I am sitting shotgun. This particular bus had a seat down by the door like it was a tour bus. I’m sitting there and I said, “Cole, we only got one rule. We don’t hit people. Cars and trees can be replaced. People cannot.” And he was looking at me like, “OK, Coach, I got you, yes sir, on three, ready, break!” Man, we are coming back and we did take out a tree. I know we took out a tree. And we get this thing close enough to the hotel and when we are parking it, he looks at me and says, “Tim, this is the first time I ever drove a bus in my life.” But it wasn’t like he was laughing about it. It was the craziest thing ever.

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Blaming the Raiders’ mediocrity in the 1990s on the kicking game would miss the mark for a team that cycled through coaches before hiring Gruden in 1998, but there were issues. The 1996 season unraveled with three successive defeats by a combined seven points following a 4-4 start. While Ford made 77 percent of his tries for the season, which was near the league average, miscues played key roles in two of the season-altering defeats. Ford’s missed 28-yarder with 0:08 left in a tie game at Tampa overshadowed 12 Oakland penalties and a costly interception during an especially brutal overtime defeat to the previously 1-8 Buccaneers.

Kingdon: We played Tampa Bay. It’s a tie score. We got the ball with like a minute and a half to go on their 7-yard line. We take a knee two times. We’re going to win the game. He shanks the kick. We lose in overtime.

Sam Farmer, former Raiders beat reporter: The one that was just a killer was when they lost at Tampa. It was just crippling.

Ford, after the game: It’s a devastating feeling.

Brown: I don’t have any vivid memories from that, probably because I’ve tried to block them out for sanity reasons. I used to say all the time, I hate kickers. That was my whole deal. You got one job, to kick a doggone ball straight, and you can’t do that?

During a 1997 game at the New York Jets, Raiders quarterback Jeff George passed for 374 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions. Brown caught 10 passes for 153 yards. James Jett caught five for 148. Napoleon Kaufman rushed for 126 yards. The Raiders allowed 16 points on defense. All that, and Oakland still lost, 23-22. Four missed field goals, one of them blocked and returned for a touchdown, factored largely, as did a missed PAT. It was a rough outing for Ford in windy conditions with a rookie snapper who struggled. This particular game was an extreme manifestation of issues that precipitated Janikowski’s selection.

Kingdon: We actually signed Phil Dawson as a free agent one year (1998). He was trying to kick into the wind at the end of a practice, he missed it and Al got nervous, so we cut him. He went on to a 20-year career after that. We kept Greg Davis for a year. And we signed Michael Husted.

Rich Gannon, former Raiders quarterback: We had signed Michael Husted and he had a pretty good leg, had pretty good success in Tampa. We get into the season and we were the best 8-8 team in football that year (1999). We lost 3-4 games because of kicking, because of special teams. He missed short kicks, he missed extra points, it was just bad. I think Jon was frustrated, I think Mr. Davis was frustrated, I think everyone was frustrated.

Husted: We were 8-8 and there might have been a game or two we lost by a point or two and I missed a kick, but we played at Denver in that snowball melee game, I hit a 44-yarder to put us up (with 1:21 remaining), Jason Elam hits from 53 and ties it, we go to overtime, Gannon gets sacked, fumbles and the next play, Mike Anderson (Editor’s note: actually Olandis Gary) runs it in for a touchdown. Being 8-8, they were looking for a scapegoat and it was me, unfortunately.

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Gruden: We had a lot of different kickers. We missed some critical kicks. We were 8-8 my first two years and, not to blame the field-goal kicking, but we missed some really clutch field goals.

Lombardi: We finally come to our senses and we sign Joe Nedney.

Gruden: We had signed Joe Nedney, who had the same agent I had, and Nedney had done an excellent job for us. He was a left-footed kicker, big guy, kicked touchbacks for us, made long-range field goals, beat the Chiefs in Arrowhead to knock them out of the playoffs. So we kind of felt pretty good about our kicker, finally.

Meanwhile, at Florida State in Tallahassee, a Polish immigrant was gathering momentum as a college kicking prospect unlike any before or since. Sebastian Janikowski stood 6-foot-1, weighed nearly 260 pounds and was dynamic in every way.

Bruce Kebric, former Raiders scouting exec: In all my years, there is only one other guy whose leg was as strong and that was the guy from Michigan State who kicked for the Saints all those years (Hall of Famer Morten Andersen).

Phil Emery, former Bears area scout who lived in Tallahassee: When he struck the ball, it wasn’t a pop. It was an explosion. It was a boom. There left no doubt every time that guy hit the ball that he had unusual leg strength. It was off the charts. I’m watching him and I’m thinking, ‘My God, is he hitting that ball fast,’ and when I started timing him, I thought maybe there was something wrong with the watch. The time it takes between the snap and the kicker’s foot actually hitting the ball, ideally you want that in 1.2 seconds. I’m hitting 1.12, 1.14, 1.15, 1.13, 1.11. The poor holder can barely get the ball in time and his foot arrived. I mean, he attacked the football.

And then you get into the guy’s body. That guy played soccer? How is that even fair? This guy’s legs were huge, he was thick. The look of him, the attack on the ball, the boom, the physicalness of this guy, I mean, when you were around him, he just had this nervous, aggressive, man’s man energy about him. You noticed it right away. And then he is blowing people up! I mean, this guy is covering kicks. That aggression, that unusual body, that explosiveness in him was all the way through. He hurt some people. He laid people out. He just loved it and they loved him for it.

Kebric: He didn’t run at the combine. The kickers don’t run. So we went to Florida State and timed Janikowski the same day we did wide receiver Peter Warrick. It was raining real hard, so we went in the gym and Peter did not run a good time on the wood floor. They slipped and slid. We measured Sebastian that day at 6013 (6-foot-1 and 3/8 inches), 256 pounds and he ran a 4.89. And his vertical jump was 29, his broad jump was 8-5. How many kickers do you know who lifted? He bench-pressed 225 14 times. So, you can see what type of athlete the guy was. He is like a defensive lineman.

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Paul Healy, agent for Janikowski: Sebastian is a once-in-a-generation prospect that comes around.

Ford, Husted and Greg Davis never again became full-time kickers after leaving the Raiders. The position wasn’t necessarily haunted, or was it? After Ford missed the game-winner against Tampa, frustrated fans at the Oakland Coliseum waved a banner with “FORD = Found On Road Dead” written across it. Ford’s performance slipped from there. Greg Davis beat him out heading into 1998. Buffalo signed Ford as a kickoff specialist, only to release him a month into the season. Years passed, and the next time Ford made headlines, he was a different man, almost unrecognizable with long hair and a thick beard, standing in a Nevada courtroom to face felony charges for a crime that seemed as nonsensical then as it does now: firing shotgun blasts at the Las Vegas home of entertainers Siegfried & Roy, purportedly because Ford considered them a threat to the country (no one was injured). A judge ruled Ford unfit to stand trial.

The former USC business student who once made seven extra points and a field goal in the Cotton Bowl is now 47 and works in his native Arizona for Anthem Equity Group, which his father co-founded. According to a company bio, Cole is “responsible for the active management of St. David holdings and the operation of Enclave Farms hay production.” There is no mention of his football career. Ford’s father, Rodger, said his son declined to comment, citing negative media in the past.

Rodger Ford: Cole is doing great. He is likable. He has a smile that does not quit. His mother, my wife, spends five days a week farming with Cole and they just love it. He owns a lot of big equipment and he is doing the infrastructure for our master plan subdivision of 800 acres and it seems like it just fits him right. He really is happy with it.

Looking back on his football career, one thing Cole could do consistently was put the ball out of the end zone when they kicked from the 30, so that was a real asset to the team. As he got into his third year with the Raiders, the fans might have really got to him. I don’t know that for sure. I remember they had big banners with “FORD: Found On Road Dead” on them. He missed an easy one in Tampa Bay, and Cole said that was a long plane ride home. We don’t know really what happened. It could have been like PTSD. But Gruden was great. He liked Cole. He offered Cole a nice signing bonus to stay, but Cole said to himself, “I don’t think I can live up to the expectations of it,” so they moved him to Buffalo and he was there enough to get a fourth year for his NFL retirement. He is really appreciative of that.

Ford and the Raiders’ 1998 kicker, Greg Davis, were long gone from Oakland as the organization considered its options in the 2000 draft. Nedney and Husted still thought they had a shot. One departed with reverence, the other in almost comical fashion.

Husted: Joe Nedney and myself, we are walking out after a workout sometime before the draft, Gruden sees us and goes, “Hey, you two are my guys, man. I can’t wait to see you guys compete next year.” Then I’m up in Tahoe with my wife and oldest daughter. I go snowboarding, come back, I see the ticker and it’s like, “Oakland Raiders, 17th pick, Sebastian Janikowski, kicker from Florida State.” I look at my wife and I’m going, “Cass? We’re not going to be in Oakland next year.”

Nedney: Husted was like, “Screw this, I’m out of here.” I looked at it as, I signed a contract, I got to show up and if this Janikowski dude is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I go out there and compete with this guy, it might give me some credibility. That was a transformation for me and a motivation for me like I never felt.

Husted: Jano is left-footed, Joe is left-footed, maybe they keep Joe around and see what happens. I asked for my release and they wouldn’t do it. I walked into the locker room and did not see my name tag on a locker even though I was still on the team, so I grabbed one of those wardrobe cardboard boxes like you use when you are moving, and I just made that my locker in the middle of the locker room. Gruden walked in that day and saw me changing in it — I would literally change in it — and he didn’t like that very much.

Nedney: When I was released, Al Davis called me personally on my cell phone and said, “I just want to tell you, you could have done it a lot of different ways, but you were standup about it and I appreciate that and you’ll always be a Ray-dah.” I am standing there just saying, “Thank you so much, Mr. Davis,” and the people in the room look at me like, “Shut up, that’s not Al Davis.” And I get off the phone and I’m like, “Wow, that just happened.” And Mark Davis, from that point on, the entire Raider family has always been really, really classy toward me. I have nothing but love and respect for that organization. Always will.

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Prominent NFL players Rae Carruth and Ray Lewis faced murder charges in early 2000, spurring a directive from commissioner Paul Tagliabue for teams to reemphasize screening for character in the evaluation process. Janikowski’s indiscretions seemed to be mostly of the frat-boy variety, but they were serious enough entering the draft that deportation to his native Poland was a possibility. That meant absolutely nothing to the NFL owner who kept at least one middle finger raised in the direction of the league office at all times.

Lombardi: Al could give a shit about that. He could care less.

Kebric: Three of us scouted Janikowski and we all gave him a second-round grade. We just didn’t feel we could give him a first-round grade. He had off-field problems, was arrested, could have been deported. I actually found my report on him from Florida State. This is what they said about him: tough, competitor, enjoys pressure; born in Poland, has been in U.S. five years, father lives here, mother still lives in Poland; likes to drink, party; hit a male Florida State cheerleader in a bar, no charges brought; doesn’t like school or go to class; suspended academically. It went on and on.

Bob Casullo, former Raiders special teams coach: I had coached at Georgia Tech against Janikowski. Mr. Davis grilled me on him, and I told him I had never seen a guy like this. I mean, you close your eyes and just listen to him kick a ball, it sounds different. So, they sent me down to Florida State and the day I was there, Janikowski wasn’t there. I really didn’t know what to do. Long story short, I get to go to the emperor’s palace and I was thrilled. I mean, I got to meet Bobby Bowden. He never said anything bad about Sebastian. He just said, “He’s is his own guy, we kind of let him do his own thing and he’s been very good for us, and you know, you’re going to have to watch over him, but all in all, exactly what you see — he is as good as there is.”

I went back and met with Al Davis and told him what Bobby Bowden felt. And he said, “How was Janikowski?” I said, “Never got to see him — he wasn’t there.” Al goes, “Did you have a problem with that?” I said, “Not really. I don’t know where he was. Could have been in class.” Which I knew wasn’t true, but to be honest with you, I wanted the kid.

Late in the first round was as early as the experts thought Janikowski might be drafted. The late Joel Buchsbaum of Pro Football Weekly projected him to the Raiders, but after the first round. The late Orlando Sentinel columnist Jerry Greene called Janikowski “the perfect Raider party animal” and said the Raiders would love to select him. ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. was one of the very few to project Janikowski going in the first round, to the Rams at No. 31. The late Will McDonough of the Boston Globe, long a confidant of Al Davis, had the Raiders selecting Julian Peterson in the first. The late Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated projected John Abraham to Oakland.

Casullo: We get closer to draft day, it is quite apparent, sworn to secrecy, that Mr. Davis is going to take Janikowski with the No. 1 pick. All of a sudden, guys aren’t looking at me in the meeting room. I got hired in February and this is the end of March, and I am sitting there and already I’ve got the head coach looking at me cross-eyed like, “What are you doing?”

Kebric: I told the rest of the guys in the department who had never worked for other teams, “For 364 days, this is the best job in the nation, because Al allows us to do whatever we feel like doing, but now, on that 365th day, which is the first day of the draft, it’s frustrating as heck.” Because Al was going to say, “I know you guys are right, I see what you see, but gosh, this guy is the fastest guy at the combine. I can’t bypass him.” We went through that year after year after year.

Janikowski was extremely unique and Al turned out to be right, but at that point in time, we were coming off two 8-8 seasons and most of us felt we should take a position player.

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Gruden: We were thinking Shaun Alexander. Napoleon (Kaufman) had just suddenly retired. We were thinking Sylvester Morris, the big wide receiver who could really help us. And right out of the blue, Mr. Davis, he said, “Butch, just trust me on this, I’ve done it for a long time. Janikowski will be our leading scorer for 20 years.”

Casullo: The Bears had brought him in and wined and dined him. They picked ahead of us and took Brian Urlacher, but they were going to take Sebastian with their first pick in the second round. We knew if we did not take him in the first round, the Bears would take him in the second.

Bill Rees, former Bears college scouting director: We were not going to do anything in the first round, but Phil Emery scouted the area and he was extremely high on Janikowski, and really elevated his value in our draft room because he had a strong conviction about him, and he was right.

Emery: (Late former Bears GM) Mark Hatley loved life and he was into the story. We are going through this thing and he leaned over to me, and he always called me Philly, he said, “Hey Philly, what do you think about second round?” I said, “I’m all in.” He looked at me and started chuckling the way Mark chuckled. He goes, “Hey, don’t tell the owner, but I am too!” I could kind of feel Bill Rees looking at me like, “You didn’t just tell him to go ahead and take him in the second round, did you?”

Then “Hat” is saying, “OK, I could get there, but we have us a problem — his background. That’s a lot to swallow right there.” Yeah, it is. He said, “We’re going to get him up here.”

Healy: I really thought it was going to be Chicago because the Bears called all the time. As you probably know, Chicago has the second-largest Polish population in the world after Warsaw, and they needed help at the kicker position and I really thought they were going to pull the trigger.

Emery: I come back in and asked Mark how it went with Janikowski. He said it went great. He said, “I took him to Polish Town in Chicago. They got their own little mayor over there and I took him there and those boys hung out, had lunch, maybe they might have had a couple beers.” And they told Mark, “We got you. You draft that guy, we’ve got your back. We’ll take care of this kid.” And I said to Mark, “You mean they will look out for him in the Polish clubs and make sure they can keep him out of trouble?” And he goes, “Yeah, something like that, Philly. All I know is, they got our back.”

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Mark was a go. That conversation kept going, but on draft day, Mark looked at me and said, “Are you sure, Philly?” And I said, “I’m sure, Mark, let’s take him.” Then when Al Davis took him, Mark turned to me and smiled, chuckled and said, “Ah, hell, that’s out. What can we do about that? That’s just Al being Al.”

Casullo: Obviously, I’m not giving anything away because it was 20 years ago, but the two choices were Julian Peterson and Sebastian Janikowski. Here is the irony of the whole thing: I went to Oakland from Michigan State. Julian Peterson played for us at Michigan State. There is no finer human being than Julian Peterson. I remember Mr. Davis grilling me in the meeting room and I couldn’t say enough good things about Julian Peterson. And he said, “Well, why wouldn’t we take Julian Peterson?” And I said, “Mr. Davis, you can.” Lo and behold, the pick before us, the 49ers picked Peterson and that is what kind of clinched it for Janikowski.

Gruden: Al did a great job listening to everybody. He didn’t let on what he was thinking.

Lombardi: Julian Peterson was never in the picture. There was some love for Deltha O’Neal. Al liked Deltha O’Neal, who went at 15, right before us, to Denver. The scouts, like Kingdon, loved Urlacher. He went ninth overall. Al liked Trung Canidate, the fast running back from Arizona. Gruden would have picked Sylvester Morris, there is no doubt about that, but there was really no one that anyone was standing on the table for at that point.

Kebric: I’ve still got all my notes. As scouts, here is how we though the draft should go: We thought LaVar Arrington should be the first pick, then Courtney Brown, Corey Simon, Peter Warrick and Brian Urlacher. This is what we gave to Al. Then, after Urlacher, we also had first-round grades on Chris Samuels, Plaxico Burress, Deltha O’Neal, Jamal Lewis, Rashard Anderson, Shaun Alexander, Chris McIntosh, Shaun Ellis, Rob Morris, Ron Dayne and then Sylvester Morris. Those were the 16 guys that we thought were legitimate first-rounders. We had Julian Peterson in the top 20 along with Thomas Jones, Eric Flowers and R. Jay Soward. And I liked John Abraham.

Kingdon: I remember I was talking to Kent McCloughan, a great scout and the first bump-and-run corner in football. I remember saying to Kent, “If we could draft a guy this year, who if he was on our roster last year, we would have won four more games, would you draft this guy?” And he said, “Is this a trick question?” We had lost four games the previous year because of missed field goals, very makable field goals. I was very much in favor of it.

Amy Trask, former Raiders exec: We made the selection and boy, I would need more than one hand, probably just less than two hands worth of fingers, to count the number of individuals in the organization — coaches, player personnel staff, scouts — who grumbled to me about it. They expressed disdain for the pick and then when Sebastian turned out to be the player he was, the contributor he was, the phenomenal kicker and teammate he was, funny how those people forgot that they expressed disdain for the pick and all of a sudden, wasn’t that a great pick?

Healy: Bruce Allen did the contracts for the Raiders at that time and our first meeting, after the draft, we agreed to meet in Dallas at the airport, which was basically halfway between where I was in Jacksonville and where Bruce was in Oakland. Sebastian had been out the night before and I remember Bruce telling me Sebastian got arrested the night before in Tallahassee. Bruce heard about it as the plane in Oakland was ready to take off down the runway. He almost stood up and asked to get off the plane. It was too late.

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Here we are, at whatever the hotel is there, and we are in the lounge and it’s a sports bar and of course the TVs were on and they were talking about my client. It’s just Bruce and me, and we look up and there is a picture of Sebastian with his latest mugshot, holding the number plate up or whatever the hell they do, and stuff is going across the bottom of the screen. Needless to say, a contract did not get finished on that go-around.

In all fairness, Sebastian did go to a jury trial and was found not guilty, so remember that. And you will not find a more loyal person that is always looking out for you than Sebastian. He had a few incidents here and there, but in 19 years, he was never suspended for one game for anything.

Kingdon: Sebastian came in and he was, uh, immature. What are you going to say?

Adam Treu, former Raiders snapper: Special teams meetings were 45 minutes prior to the team meeting. Sebastian would come rolling in smelling like Givenchy or some type of cologne. He always smelled real nice. I don’t know if he had a good night or a bad night when he was wearing that stuff.

Gruden: We played at New Orleans his rookie year and, opening possession, we made three or four first downs and I sent the field-goal team out there to kick a 50-yarder or something in the Superdome (it was 49 yards). Janikowski had been late for curfew the night before the game and I was really pissed, so I yelled, “Field goal!” and I remember Bob Casullo, the special teams coach, he said, “He didn’t get into the room till 4 a.m.! There is no way he can make it.” I said, “Field goal!” I was hoping he would miss it, just so I could MF him on the near hash. He made that thing by 20 yards and I hugged him. I said, “I love you, man!”

Kingdon: Sebastian moved in with Shane Lechler and that really helped to stabilize him a lot. And when he got married, I think that really helped him get focused.

Kebric: I knew Shane from Texas and I said, “Let’s see if Shane will room with Sebastian.” Shane is just the opposite of him. He came to me late in the season and said, “I’m not going to do it for Year 2, I just can’t do it. The guy shows up every morning at 6 o’clock, I have to put him up and such.” We struggled through the immaturity things and then he met a girl, got married and he completely changed.

Gruden: I called them Beavis and Butt-head, Lechler and Janikowski. They did everything they could to have a good time and mess with my mind. We are playing the Denver Broncos in Denver and they are a hell of a team. All these guys are talking about is the altitude. Lechler says, “I can’t wait to punt that ball, I’m going to punt it out of the goddamn stadium.” Janikowski is like, “I’m going to make a 90-yard field goal.” I’m saying, “Shut up.” Then we go out there for pregame warmup and five of the Bronco players are screaming at me because our two kickers are kicking a ball right into their warmups. I almost got my ass kicked because of these guys.

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Gannon: Gruden put those guys’ lockers right next to me. I worked with those guys a lot, just talking to them all the time, about being disciplined, being on time, being professionals, taking care of their legs, taking care of themselves. I’m not saying I did anything special, but they were a project for me because I realized they could really help us. And I was really proud of what they did, long after I left. Those guys are great professionals.

Casullo: I’ve coached high school, I have coached Division I football for 18 years, I coached in the NFL for 10 and I always say this: With kids, eventually, the light switches on. They figure it out. Some kids are 18. Some kids may be 22. Some kids may be 25. But sooner or later the light goes on. And in Janikowski’s case, after about midway through the second year, almost two-thirds of the way through the second year, the light went on and he became a professional football player.

Janikowski earned nearly $53.3 million over 18 NFL seasons, a record for a kicker, according to Spotrac. He connected on 58 tries from at least 50 yards, most in NFL history. The Raiders ranked 11th in field goal percentage from inside 50 yards during Janikowski’s 17 seasons. They were last from 1996-99. Their ranking on field goals from all distances was only 27th during the Janikowski era, in part because Oakland attempted a league-high 104 tries from 50-plus yards. The Raiders led the NFL in kickoff touchback rate from 2000-10, before the kickoff yard-line was moved from the 30 to the 35. In short, everything about the kicking game changed for Oakland when Janikowski showed up. 

Nedney: After we drafted him, there was a practice in Napa where we had a field-goal distance competition out on one of the side fields. “Whatever you can do, I can do better. Let’s see how far back we can go.” And I hit from 68, I remember. And he looked at me and he backed all the way up to 75. And he missed it, but the ball was like halfway up the upright when it went wide. And I just kind of looked at him and that was when I was like, “OK, I can’t compete with this shit.”

Kingdon: We had a December game at Cleveland in 2009. It was like 34 degrees when it started, there was a wind chill at 30, it was windy and wet. Sebastian kicked a 61-yard field goal to end the first half. I remember talking to Jeff Jaeger about it. He said that might have been the best kick ever in the history of football, under those conditions. Yeah, Sebastian was pretty good.

Gruden: You got all these geniuses in the draft. There is an expert on every corner criticizing the pick and crucifying us for taking a kicker in the first round, but also, they did not live with us day to day and understand the struggles that we had making field goals. Ultimately, it was about winning tight football games. Al had the foresight to do it and had done it before with a specialist in Ray Guy and he was not afraid at all. He could care less what the analysts thought. We made that pick and then in the fifth round we took Shane Lechler and you could argue both of those guys have a case for the Hall of Fame.

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