Gano wants shot at Tucker’s record
Graham Gano thought it was a misprint.
The Giants kicker checked his phone in Sunday’s postgame locker room to see how former teammate Ryan Santoso had done in his first game kicking for the Detroit Lions.
He saw Santoso’s go-ahead, 35-yard field goal with 1:04 to play against the Baltimore Ravens on the play-by-play. Then Gano looked again.
“At the bottom of the box score it said ‘Justin Tucker 66 yard field goal,’” Gano said Wednesday. “And I was like, ‘OK, it’s gotta be a mistake. ‘Cause there’s actually been tons of times on the apps when it says 66 yard field goal and it was actually a 56, and they mess it up.
“So I went to Twitter, searched his name and I was like, ‘Holy cow, he actually did it.”
Tucker did it. He kicked the longest made field goal in NFL history to lift the Ravens to a 19-17 road win at the buzzer. He had shattered Matt Prater’s previous record of 64 yards against the Tennessee Titans in December 2013.
“I’m happy for him,” Gano said of Tucker. “He’s extremely talented, definitely a hard worker.”
Gano, 34, no slouch himself, connected from a career-high 63 yards at the buzzer on Oct. 7, 2018, to lift the Carolina Panthers over the Giants, 33-31.
He also owns the NFL’s longest active streak at 37 consecutive made field goals as the Giants (0-3) head to New Orleans to face the Saints (2-1).
So is it really hard to believe Gano could one day top Tucker, perhaps even inside the Caesars Superdome here in Week 4?
“I hope I get that chance, 100%,” Gano said with a smile of one day maybe outkicking Tucker. “The situation’s gotta be right. This stadium we kick in [at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey] is maybe not the most favorable for long, long kicks. I guess we’ll see [in the Superdome] if the
AC is blowing the right way. That’s below sea level down there.”
Not that Gano wasn’t impressed by Tucker’s 66-yarder that bounced off the crossbar and in. He just wasn’t surprised.
“I wasn’t surprised because he and I, in pre-games before we’ve just backed it up, backed it up, backed it up, just to see who can hit the furthest,” Gano said with a smile. “So I knew he could hit far ones. We played in Baltimore years back and we both went probably close to 70. And it was just back and forth, back and forth.”
Gano joked that eventually his Panthers teammates told the two kickers, “Alright, you guys both need to chill out.”
“It was just one of those funny things,” he said. “It’s just competition against the other guy. And we probably had a long of like 30 that day [in the game].”
Tucker told NBC’s WBAL11 in Baltimore after the game that more than anything he just tried to “match my foot up to the sweet spot of the ball so I can give it a chance.
“I kicked the ball like I was kicking a kickoff or like a long drive, thinking I’m just gonna smoke this ball and see what happens,” Tucker said with a smile. “‘Cause that’s kind of what you have to do when you’re not just on the other side of the field but when you’re well beyond the 50 yard line.”
Tucker said he knew he was going for the record jogging onto the field but he wasn’t thinking about anything other than “trying to smoke this ball and give it a chance.” He credited long-snapper Nick Moore’s delivery and the laces-out hold of his longtime holder, punter Sam Koch.
Gano also immediately noticed something he’d never seen before.
“As far as form goes, [Tucker] did take a gather step, kind of like a crow hop into it, which I thought was really cool,” Gano said. “That was unique. I’ve never seen anybody do that. But that was neat to see that from him, and I think that was just off the top of his head. I think that’s what makes him great.”