Tyler Bass, the Buffalo Bills, and Five Years of Field Goals That Will Never Be Forgotten
Tyler Bass is the placekicker for the Buffalo Bills. He has been since 2020, when Buffalo drafted him in the sixth round out of Georgia Southern. Through the 2024 season he had made 131 of 155 field goal attempts in the regular season, good for an 84.5 percent career rate. He missed the entire 2025 season with a pelvic injury that required surgery. He is the expected starter in 2026.
That’s the summary version. The fuller version involves a missed 44-yard kick that ripped open a 33-year-old wound in Western New York, a 61-yard game-winner that briefly made him a hero, and a franchise that has committed to him despite all of it.
Where He Came From
Bass grew up in Irmo, South Carolina, outside Columbia, and played both football and soccer at Dutch Fork High School. He credits his grandmother with pushing him to try out for the football team, the logic being that anyone with a soccer leg had no business not kicking a football. He committed to Georgia Southern in January 2015.
His four years with the Eagles (2015-2019) produced 54 made field goals out of 68 attempts (79.41 percent) and 114 extra points. He earned first-team All-Sun Belt honors in 2018 after going 19-for-21 on field goals, including a perfect 45-for-45 on extra points that season. His senior year was messier: 20 made field goals set a school record, but he also missed eight attempts, finishing at 71.4 percent. That inconsistency made some scouts hesitant.
At the Senior Bowl in January 2020 he showed enough leg strength to reset the conversation. CBS Sports ranked him the third-best kicker in the draft class. His college career long was 50 yards, which understated what he could actually hit from distance.
Rookie Year and Early Bills Career
Buffalo selected Bass 188th overall, the ninth pick of the sixth round. He was the first Georgia Southern player ever chosen by the Bills, and only the 12th kicker the franchise had drafted in its history. The Bills don’t spend picks on kickers lightly.
He won the competition with veteran Stephen Hauschka in training camp and never looked back. His 2020 season was legitimately excellent: he scored 141 points, a Bills franchise record at the time. He also attempted eight field goals in a single game in Week 7, another franchise record. For a sixth-round rookie, that kind of immediate volume and reliability was not the expected outcome.
Through 2022 Bass was among the more dependable kickers in the league. The Bills rewarded him in April 2023 with a four-year contract extension. The total value has been reported as both $20.4 million and $21 million across different sources, with Spotrac and the Democrat and Chronicle citing $20.4 million as the base figure. Either way, the commitment was real.
His 2023 regular season numbers: 24-for-29 on field goals, 49-for-50 on extra points. He was named AFC Special Teams Player of the Month for September 2023. Then came January.
Wide Right, Again
January 21, 2024. AFC Divisional Round. Buffalo hosting Kansas City at Highmark Stadium. Bills down 27-24, Josh Allen directing a 16-play drive late in the fourth quarter. Two incompletions from the Kansas City 26-yard line put Bass on the field for a 44-yard attempt with 1:43 remaining.
The kick sailed wide right.
Jim Nantz on CBS said: “Wide right. The two most dreaded words in Buffalo.” Kevin Harlan on Westwood One was louder: “The kick is up and NO GOOD. WIDE RIGHT! WIDE RIGHT!” The local Buffalo radio call was, by multiple accounts, nearly silent.
Scott Norwood missed a 47-yarder wide right in Super Bowl XXV in January 1991. Both kicks from roughly the same distance, both in elimination games, both the same direction. Bass acknowledged afterward that he failed to account for the left-to-right wind: “I was trusting my line that I had in warmups. Hit a good ball, but it didn’t work out. Totally on me.” He finished that 2023 season (regular season plus playoffs) with his lowest field goal percentage in four years: 76.5 percent. The Bills lost 27-24 and Kansas City went on to win the Super Bowl.
Speculation that Buffalo would replace him in the offseason was widespread. They did not.
2024: Everything at Once
Bass opened 2024 by missing three field goals and two extra points in his first six games. All three missed field goals came from inside 50 yards. Fan pressure to cut him reached levels that are, for an NFL kicker, unusual. The Bills held steady.
Week 9, November 3, 2024. Bills hosting Miami. Bass had made two field goals in the first half (40 yards and 49 yards). Then he missed an extra point, his third of the season. Later, he hit the inside of the left upright on a second extra point attempt; it deflected through. Dolphins scored late to tie the game. With 10 seconds left on fourth down, McDermott sent Bass out for a 61-yard field goal attempt into the wind.
The CBS broadcast team suggested trying a Hail Mary instead.
He split the uprights. New franchise record. Bills 30, Dolphins 27. Josh Allen, who rarely shows much about his internal state on the field, said afterward that the kick took his breath away.
Bass didn’t miss another field goal for the rest of the regular season after that game in Week 9, he had missed one more in Week 13 (a snow game against San Francisco). He finished the regular season 24-for-29 on field goals (83 percent), 59-for-64 on extra points. Then in the playoffs: 6-for-6 on field goals, 7-for-7 on extra points. Perfect.
For what it’s worth, the 2024 Bills lost in the AFC Championship Game, not because of the kicker.
What Happened in 2025
Bass showed up to 2025 training camp and by July 28 was missing practices with what the team initially called pelvic soreness. It became a hip and groin designation. He returned for the preseason finale against Tampa Bay on August 23, making his kicks in limited attempts. The Bills placed him on injured reserve on September 5, the day the regular season started.
He underwent surgery in November 2025 to repair what was ultimately described as a sports hernia. Sean McDermott confirmed: “He ended up getting a surgery this past week here, so he is basically out for the season.”
Matt Prater, who is 41 years old and had been playing professional football since 2006, stepped in. Prater went 17-for-19 on field goals during the regular season (90 percent) and made all five of his field goal attempts and all six of his extra points during the playoffs. Michael Badgley also appeared briefly. Neither is on the Bills roster for 2026.
Brandon Beane said on January 31, 2026: “If he’s not 100 percent, he’s right at it. I would expect Tyler Bass to be our kicker in ’26.” Bass was officially activated off injured reserve on February 15, 2026.
In March 2026 the Bills restructured his contract. His original 2026 cap figure was $4.9 million, steep for a player who had missed an entire year. The restructure included $1 million in guaranteed money with incentives allowing him to earn back up to $3.5 million depending on performance. According to Heavy.com and Spotrac, the restructured deal carries a 2026 cap hit of approximately $3.05 million and a 2027 figure of $5.57 million, freeing roughly $1.92 million in space. The Democrat and Chronicle reported the same cap savings figure independently.
Career Numbers, Laid Out Plainly
These are through the 2024 season, since Bass played no regular-season games in 2025.
Field goals made: 131. Field goals attempted: 155. Career FG percentage: 84.5. Longest: 61 yards. Extra points made: 264. Extra points attempted: 274. Touchbacks: 298. Career points scored: 657.
From beyond 50 yards, he has connected on 69.6 percent of attempts, per CBS Sports. That number matters for a kicker in Buffalo, where wind at Highmark Stadium is genuinely difficult, not just a talking point. His career-low season FG percentage was the 2023-24 playoff stretch (76.5 percent combining that regular season and postseason). His best full regular season by percentage was 2022, when he was above 90 percent.
StatMuse has him at 657 career points, which makes him one of the highest-scoring players in Bills history by total points from the kicker position.
The Bills’ Complicated Relationship With Their Own Kickers
The phrase “wide right” is not just a description of a missed kick in Buffalo. It is a cultural marker that runs through the franchise’s history the way certain plays do for only a handful of franchises. Norwood’s miss in Super Bowl XXV (January 1991, 47 yards, Giants 20, Bills 19) is still referenced in everyday conversation in Western New York more than 30 years later. The Bills lost four straight Super Bowls from 1991 through 1994. That first loss, by one point, on a field goal, is the one people remember.
Bass’s January 2024 miss was not the same as Norwood’s miss. It was a divisional round game, not a Super Bowl. But the distance was close (44 yards versus 47), the direction was identical, and the elimination was final. Nantz’s call landed the way it did because it was accurate: the two most dreaded words in that city had just happened again, in a playoff game, at home, with a legitimate AFC contender on the field.
The 61-yard kick in November 2024 provided something Norwood never got: a sequel where the kicker comes back and makes the impossible one. Whether that fully closes the loop depends on who you ask in Buffalo, and the honest answer is probably not fully, but it changed the story.
What to Expect in 2026
Bass is the starter. The Bills have said so explicitly, have structured his contract around that assumption, and have no other kicker on the roster as of early 2026. He will be 29 when the season starts, coming off his first serious injury in six professional seasons.
The surgical concern with a hip and pelvic procedure for a kicker is specific: the mechanics of a placekick involve a rotational drive through the hip that is hard to fully replicate in a non-contact rehabilitation setting. “Cleared” means cleared to return to practice activity, not necessarily that everything feels identical to pre-surgery. Whether Bass has lost any range or consistency will only show up on the field in 2026 preseason.
The offensive context is favorable. Joe Brady, who replaced Sean McDermott as head coach, is known for aggressive playcalling and maximizing Josh Allen’s passing volume. More scoring means more extra point attempts and more field goals from close range, the kicks Bass has always made at a high rate. Fantasy football managers who leave him off rosters because he has no 2025 stats are leaving value on the table, assuming health.
The one thing that would actually worry Bills fans is the same thing that has always been there: his performance in high-leverage situations, particularly in playoff games and in cold/wind conditions at Highmark Stadium late in the season. His 2024 postseason (6-for-6) was encouraging. His 2023 playoff (2-for-5) was not. There’s no clean resolution between those two data points, which is part of why the 2026 season matters as much as it does for Bass personally.
He starts the year as the incumbent, with a manageable contract, on one of the better offenses in the AFC. The rest is what happens when he actually kicks.
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