Jake
Moody.
Jake
Moody.
Michigan· 6'1"· 209 lb
"A kicker good enough to justify the pick and fragile enough to prove why teams almost never make it — Moody's rookie year was the case for, and everything after was the case against."Pre-draft read
Moody was Michigan's every-down placekicker by his junior year, handling field goals, extra points and kickoffs out of a compact, metronomic operation. His swing is short and repeatable rather than violent: quiet approach, level shoulders, a firm plant foot and a strike that stays through the ball instead of wrapping around it. The result is a low-variance flight that holds its line in Big Ten November weather.
The secondary trait is raw leg. He hit from 59 in the Fiesta Bowl and lived from 50-plus in warmups, expanding Michigan's operational range. He also kicked off with real hang time. The signature is temperament — he owned pressure kicks in a program that had lost games to them, and never looked like the moment moved him.
Cold-weather, field-position offense that needs a trustworthy 50-plus operation and a kickoff leg
Year 1: immediate starting placekicker and kickoff man on a contender with a settled snap-hold battery. Ceiling: a decade-long starter who expands his offense's fourth-down math inside the 40.
A dome-to-outdoor swing team that leans on him for volume 45-to-55-yard tries every week, or a roster with an unsettled long snapper and holder — his accuracy is timing-dependent, not brute force.
Best used by a staff willing to keep the same holder for years; the swing is repeatable but the operation around it has to be, too.
Jake Moody BOOTS 59-yard field goal for Michigan to end first half
Program-record 59-yarder in the Fiesta Bowl against TCU — the clearest look at his leg and strike at max range.
Michigan K Jake Moody boots game winning 35 yard field goal vs. Illinois
Game-winner in miserable conditions against Illinois in 2021, the pressure rep that defines his college résumé.
Jake Moody hits 59 yard field goal (Fiesta Bowl, all-22 angle)
Alternate angle on the record kick, useful for the plant-foot mechanics and follow-through.
Moody is the rare kicker who earns a real evaluation rather than a courtesy grade. He arrived at Michigan as a walk-on, lost the job, won it back, and finished as the most decorated specialist in the country. The profile is built on operation and repeatability first, leg strength second — a combination that translates when the snap-hold timing is clean.
The production backs it. He went 23-of-25 in 2021, then 29-of-35 in 2022 with a program-record 59-yarder against TCU, and never missed an extra point in his career — 148-for-148. He won the Lou Groza Award in 2021 and was a finalist again in 2022. The flags are the ones every kicker carries: a small career sample, a shaky 2020 that showed what a bad stretch looks like, and misses that cluster from 40-plus rather than in the short range.
The board had him as the top kicker in the class and a fringe Day 3 value, because the market for specialists almost never opens before the fourth round. San Francisco, a contender with a fully built roster and a recent history of playoff kicking failures, took him at 99 — an aggressive price the team framed as buying certainty at a position that had cost it games.
- 01
Operation
Compact, repeatable swing with a quiet approach and firm plant, the kind of low-maintenance mechanics that survive bad fields, cold weather and a rushed hold.
- 02
Leg strength
Program-record 59-yarder against TCU and comfortable range past 50, which let Michigan keep the field-goal unit on for kicks most Big Ten teams punt.
- 03
Extra-point reliability
Finished 148-for-148 on PATs across five seasons, a perfect career mark that speaks to how rarely his strike wandered off-center.
- 04
Pressure profile
Took over late-game kicks for a College Football Playoff program and delivered, winning the 2021 Lou Groza Award as the nation's best kicker.
- 05
Bounce-back history
Lost the job and shot 1-of-4 in 2020, then answered with 23-of-25 the next fall, evidence of a specialist who can rebuild his own confidence.
- 01
Long-range accuracy
Misses cluster from 40 and beyond (10-of-15 from 40-plus in 2022), so the big leg does not always come with the strike quality to match.
- 02
Sample size
Only 84 career field-goal attempts, and the bulk of the résumé lives in two seasons, which thins out the track record any team is buying.
- 03
Positional value
A kicker taken this high has to be near-automatic immediately; there is no developmental runway and no second job to fall back on.
- 04
Injury sensitivity
The whole profile rests on a healthy plant leg and clean timing, and any lower-body issue rewrites the evaluation overnight.
| Yr | Team | G | Punts | Yds | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Michigan | — | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | Michigan | — | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | Michigan | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | Michigan | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | Michigan | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Career | — | 34 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Verified against cfbstats (2020-2022) and FOX Sports season splits (2018-2019); season sums reconcile to the 69-of-84 FG and 148-of-148 XP career totals. Games played not published for 2018-2019, left null.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Honors
- Lou Groza Award (2021)
- Consensus All-American (2021)
- Lou Groza Award finalist (2022)
- Two-time First-Team All-Big Ten (2021, 2022)
- Michigan record 59-yard field goal (2022 Fiesta Bowl)
Solid starter-level accuracy with a career shaped by streaks, jobs won and lost, and one strong stretch that keeps him employed.
Big-leg kicker who became the automatic postseason answer for a contender — the outcome San Francisco was buying.
The cautionary case of a Day 2 kicker whose mechanics unraveled under the weight of where he was drafted.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Jake Moody was the starting kicker for the San Francisco 49ers in his rookie season (2023), making 21 of 25 field goal attempts and 60 of 61 extra point attempts.
San Francisco got exactly the rookie season it paid for. Moody hit 21-of-25 with 60-of-61 extra points in 2023, made the PFWA All-Rookie Team, and kicked a then-record 55-yarder in Super Bowl LVIII. Then the floor gave way. A high ankle sprain in October 2024 cost him weeks, and his accuracy never came back: 24-of-34 on the season, with the misses concentrated exactly where he had been vulnerable in college, from 40 and beyond. He opened 2025 by going 1-of-3 in Week 1 at Seattle and was waived days later, ending the experiment before his rookie deal did. He landed on Chicago's practice squad, kicked one game there, then signed with Washington in November 2025 and re-signed in March 2026. The Commanders released him in August 2026 after a rough camp, handing the job to an undrafted rookie.
The honest read is that the miss was the price, not the player. Moody was a legitimate top-of-class kicker and his rookie year proved the evaluation was sound. What a third-round pick buys is stability, and a kicker whose form was that tied to a healthy plant leg was never going to deliver it. Specialists have almost no margin for a bad month; taking one at 99 means paying Day 2 money for a job most teams refill off the street in 48 hours.
Data note: Resolution JC-2A selection