Paul McFadden's 14 Misses: The NFL's Untouchable Record

Published on September 6th, 2025 12:15 pm EST
Written By: Dave Manuel


Paul McFadden entered the NFL in 1984 as a fresh-legged rookie out of Youngstown State. Drafted in the 12th round by the Philadelphia Eagles, he immediately surprised everyone by winning the kicking job. That season, he went 30-for-46 on field goals, nailed all 27 of his extra points, and even won NFC Rookie of the Year honors. But buried inside his debut campaign was one of the strangest and ugliest records in league history: the longest consecutive streak of missed field goals by any NFL kicker.

McFadden missed 14 straight attempts in the middle of the 1984 season. Fourteen. In today's game, one or two misses can put a kicker on the hot seat. Fourteen in a row is practically unthinkable. Yet the Eagles kept trotting him out. The league didn't have the same supply of kicking specialists that exists now, and coaches often showed more patience with young legs.

The sequence started in Week 5, when McFadden began sailing attempts wide and short. He missed everything through Week 10, then Week 11, and even Week 12. By the time he finally connected again, his streak of misses had reached double digits and then some. No other kicker has ever approached that number. Chris Bahr of the Raiders once missed 11 straight. A few others have had stretches of seven or eight. But McFadden's mark of 14 consecutive failures has lasted for nearly four decades.

What makes the story stranger is that McFadden still finished his rookie season with 116 points scored, which was sixth-best in the NFL that year. He converted enough when he finally broke through to salvage respectable totals. His early struggles didn't end his career either - he kicked for five seasons, finishing with 91 field goals on 147 attempts, good for 61.9 percent. That conversion rate looks brutal by modern standards, but in the mid-1980s the league average was just 71 percent.

McFadden's streak also underscores how different the game was. The uprights were narrower than they are today. Many kicks came off muddy grass surfaces, not turf. Specialist coaching was limited. A kicker could go cold for weeks and still be trusted to line up again. The patience paid off in his case: McFadden remained Philadelphia's kicker for three seasons before moving on to the Giants and Falcons.

To this day, no kicker has matched his 14-miss run. Even infamous names like Mike Vanderjagt (2005 playoff choke), Mike Nugent (2016 extra point nightmare), or Cody Parkey (2018 "double doink") never came close to his streak. Those moments lived in headlines. McFadden's streak has lived in the record books.

For comparison, here's a snapshot of notable streaks:

Paul McFadden, Eagles, 1984: 14 straight misses

Chris Bahr, Raiders, 1983: 11 straight

Doug Brien, 1995-96: 9 straight

A cluster of kickers, 7-8 consecutive misses across various seasons

In today's NFL, a kicker missing more than five in a row would almost certainly lose his job. McFadden's 14 remains one of those oddities from a very different era of football, a number so large it feels untouchable.