In 1983, there were 46 field goal attempts of 52 yards or longer. That year, just 17 of them were successful… and four of them came from Baltimore Colts rookie kicker Raul Allegre. But that’s just the highlight for perhaps the best kicking season ever.

During the Colts last year in Baltimore, fans voted Allegre the team’s most valuable player. And with good reason: Allegre attempted 35 field goals, but given the distances of those kicks and the kicking environment in 1983, we would have expected Allegre to make 21.2 of those attempts. Instead, Allegre connected on 30 field goals, giving him 8.8 more field goals above average. That’s the highest rate in any single season ever. Yesterday, I unveiled a methodology for ranking kickers, based on two factors: the length of each field goal attempts and the year in which they kick was attempted. Using that formula, I then was able to grade every field goal kicking season since 1960.

Let’s use Nick Lowery’s 1985 season to walk through the table below. That year, playing for the Chiefs, Lowery went 4/4 on kicks from 20-29 yards, 10/11 from 30-39 yards, 7/7 from 40-49 yards, and 3/5 from over 50 yards. (Note that while I have the data on the specific distance of each attempt, it made sense to present it for consumption in this way.) He attempted 27 kicks, and given the distances and the era, was expected to be successful on 17.2 of them. Instead, he made 24, giving him 6.8 field goals above average. If you prefer to think in terms of rates, Lowery was expected to be true on 63.7% of kicks, but actually made 88.9% of his attempts; that’s 25.2% above expectation, the highest rate by any kicker with at least 25 attempts. The table below shows the top 300 seasons since 1960:

Some thoughts:

• Jan Stenerud leads the way with ten top-100 seasons. He’s a Hall of Famer for a reason, folks, and his work from ’68 to ’70 was about as impressive a three-year stretch as one could imagine.

• Following Stenerud, Lowery, Morten Andersen, and Gary Anderson each have nine top-300 seasons.

• It’s easy to mock Garo Yepremian, but he was a legitimately great kicker in his prime. He was the top kicker in ’70 and ’71, ranked 2nd in ’72, and 4th in ’73. He also led the league in field goals above average in 1978.

• How about that Mark Moseley 1982 season? Well, it was really good. The results here are not strike-adjusted, but if you sort by the last column, you’ll see that Moseley ranks 13th in kicking percentage above expectation. It was a great year, but no, probably not MVP-worthy. Excluding the AP, most organizations selected Dan Fouts as the MVP that year, which made a lot more sense. And Moseley only won the voting by two votes, 35-33.

What about the worst kicking seasons ever? Regular readers may recall that I have written about Paul Hornung‘s 1964 season before, and this old article provides a nice recap. Unsurprisingly, Hornung tops the list of the worst 300 field goal seasons in NFL history.

That year, he was 8.6 field goals below average, an astonishing feat. If you don’t adjust for era, you get to the even more stunning conclusion: he missed 26 field goal attempts, a record that surely will not be broken any time soon.

Check back tomorrow for the career kicker rankings!