The player payroll of an N.F.L. team is about $175 million. But many teams pay the place-kicker on the roster roughly the league minimum salary, which is often less than $1 million annually.
So what? To most fans, it seems like an easy job.
Try telling that to the Minnesota Vikings or the Cleveland Browns. On Sunday, each team surely wished it had loosened the purse strings to pay for a veteran established kicker instead of the young low-cost versions they put in uniform.
The failures of the Minnesota and Cleveland kickers on Sunday were a flabbergasting cavalcade of end-over-end footballs spinning wide left and right of the goal posts.