Chad Ryland’s 2023 season with the New England Patriots was such that his head coach — a cuddly fellow named Bill Belichick — at one point pronounced the rookie kicker’s efforts as being “not good enough.” Not without reason, either.
And in his second-to-last game — on Christmas Eve in Denver — the Cedar Crest graduate was struggling again. He missed a 47-yard field goal attempt, then an extra point.
Longtime special-teams ace Matthew Slater, nursing an injury, reportedly tried to encourage Ryland on the sideline, telling him he would assuredly come through when it mattered most.
And he did.
With 2 seconds left and the score tied, Ryland nailed a 56-yard bomb to win it, 26-23. There were hugs, high-fives and helmet slaps as the Patriots celebrated their final victory in a dismal 4-13 season.
Read More: Cedar Crest grad gets kick out of NFL life while remaining true to his roots
And when Ryland met with reporters afterward, he waxed poetic.
“You find the greatest treasure in the darkest caves,” he told them.
It certainly appeared to be as dark as any. Ryland, chosen in the fourth round of the ’23 draft, finished the season just 16-for-25 on his field goal tries, a 64 percent success rate that was worst in the NFL among qualified kickers.
Belichick, the Hall of Fame-bound coach since replaced by Jerod Mayo, offered the aforementioned assessment of the rookie after he missed 35-yarders on consecutive weeks against the Colts and Giants. The latter came in the closing seconds and would have forced overtime.
But certainly the kick against Denver buoyed 24-year-old Ryland, and he took a methodical approach to the offseason; reconnecting with his long-time kicking guru to work out mental and mechanical glitches, writing in his journal, and resorting to “reps, reps, reps” in an attempt to “build that muscle memory,” as he said in a recent phone interview.
The result is that he is off to a promising start in training camp and the preseason. And even if he hasn’t completely escaped that cave he found himself in, he is unquestionably edging ever closer to its exit.
“That’s the thing you’ve got to think about at the end of the day,” he said. “It’s a really intrinsic question: Are any of us really fully out of the cave at that point? Certainly we’re closer to the light side than the dark side, but I just think that’s one of those (ongoing) journeys as an athlete, as a human – that life’s all what you make of it and how you go and attack each day, mindset-wise.”
Through the team’s first 11 practices and the preseason opener against Carolina, he had reportedly connected on 26 of 29 field goal attempts, though he didn’t have any opportunities in the 17-3 victory over the Panthers. Veteran Joey Slye, brought in to compete with Ryland for the job, was 23-for-28, including a 42-yarder against Carolina.
Ryland rued the fact that he followed that up by going 2-for-4 in a recent Sunday practice, but wasn’t about to sweat that any more than he had Slye’s arrival in May.
“That’s the nature of the business,” Ryland said. “At the end of the day this is the NFL, and you want a guy out there that’s going to make kicks at a high rate, and I didn’t do that last year. So that’s something that obviously as an organization you want to get cleaned up. Definitely expected, but at the end of the day, I always try and compete with myself, and trend in the right direction.”
Moreover, he added, “I know if I’m doing what I can do, I’ll make a lot of kicks in the long run. It’s just important to keep that level head on my shoulders and keep kicking away.”
Kicking is a fascinating specialty, given its mental and mechanical aspects. There is a team element to it, certainly, as it involves a long snapper (veteran Joe Cardona in Ryland’s case), a holder (punter Bryce Baringer) and the requisite protection. But it is ultimately a solitary task.
One might be led to believe that Ryland never felt more alone than when he took the field for that 56-yarder in Denver, given the way the season and that game were going for him.
In actuality, he said he had “a really, really clear mind” on that occasion – that he was thinking, “‘All right, this could very easily be the last kick of my career here, so I might as well go out the way I want to do it.’ What do you know – the ball goes right down the middle.”
His mental toughness is one of the things that caught the attention of another kicker, Andrew Gantz, six years ago. Gantz, who began his college career at Cincinnati, was wrapping it up at Northern Illinois. Ryland was in his first season at Eastern Michigan, where he would kick for four years before spending the 2022 season at Maryland.
“He’s a lot like me, in that he wants to be the reason you win or lose a game,” Gantz said in a recent phone interview. “He wants to be great.”
Gantz had also started out as a kicking instructor four years earlier, as an undergrad, and would go on to make his Cincinnati-based business, Game Winner Kicking, his full-time job after graduation. Ryland became one of his proteges following his freshman season at EMU.
The timing was fortuitous, as Ryland was relatively new to his craft, having kicked only his last two high school seasons; prior to that he had played baseball and soccer at Cedar Crest. But he was drawn to football after seeing Joey Julius (later a Penn State recruit) kicking for Lower Dauphin in a game against the Falcons, whose kicker, Soren Frost, went on to play soccer at Delaware.
Right away Ryland ordered kicking sticks and several footballs. He immediately took to the specialty, to the point that he and his dad, Todd, would burrow beneath the fence on the visitors’ side of Crest’s home field to work out. (“There was a gap big enough that we could slide under,” Chad recalled.)
A preferred walk-on at Eastern Michigan, he went 26-for-39 on field goals his first two seasons, with game-winners against Purdue as a freshman and Illinois as a sophomore. He felt things really began to click in 2020 – the COVID season – when he went 11-for-13 in six games. The following year he was 19-for-22 while scoring a team-record 104 points and swelling his career total to 309, another record.
He also went 19-for-23 for the Terps in ’22, attracting the attention of pro scouts in the process. The Pats traded up to draft him, but his erratic season followed.
When it was over, the first thing he did was flee New England for Miami. Spent four or five days there, ostensibly for R&R, though he admits he couldn’t resist doing some kicking his final day in town.
Then it was off to Cincinnati to huddle with Gantz, the guy he calls his “main coach.”
“I attribute all my fundamentals to him,” Ryland said, “and the majority of my success in helping me build in the right direction.”
They had not been able to work together much in the weeks and months leading up to Ryland’s rookie season, but they made up for lost time this offseason.
“We got back to basics,” Gantz said. “We were honing in on him being himself, and not being anyone other than that.”
It was also imperative, Gantz added, that they focus on what needed to be fixed, as opposed to fixating on last season.
“My approach,” he said, “is you can’t change the past and you can’t predict the future. You’ve got to live in the freakin’ moment.”
Ryland also spent some time in San Diego working out with former NFL kicker Nick Novak, a Maryland grad who has also become an instructor. And in the meantime he continued to journal, continued to record his thoughts on his craft. He didn’t wish to get into the specifics of what he wrote, but he did say it’s “very intentional, and it’s very much about being positive and (having) a good attack mindset every day.”
Which is really the key to the whole thing. While he has made some mechanical tweaks, notably transitioning to an upright stance that enables him, in kicker-speak, to “clear the space better,” the biggest thing he has going for him is his mentality.
“You get good days, you get bad days, but at the end of the day they’re still days,” Ryland said. “And being on the field, going to work at it, is better than not being on the field at all. Because at the end of the day I’m 24 years old and I’m still kicking footballs. I’m super, super, super blessed. I couldn’t ask for a better life.”
So it seems that not all caves are created equal – that the one in which Chad Ryland found himself last fall was not nearly as dark as it might have appeared. That he knows the way out, and always sees daylight. It’s just a matter of continuing to inch toward it.
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