Who Should I Start? Dustin Hopkins or Will Reichard

Tuesday, August 26, 3:18 PM

The Cleveland Brown released kicker Dustin Hopkin on Tuesday, according to Adam Schefter of ESPN. It appears that Andre Szmyt will open the 2025 regular season as the team's placekicker, although the Browns could still bring in more competition before Week 1. Hopkins will be let go after spending the last two seasons kicking for Cleveland, where he went 51-for-63 on his field-goal attempts (81%) and 41-for-46 on his extra-point tries in 31 total games. The final straw for the 34-year-old veteran might have been when he missed one of his two extra-point tries in the preseason finale on Saturday against the Los Angeles Rams. Hopkins entered training camp on shaky ground at the position after going 18-for-27 on his field goals in 16 games a year ago.

Tuesday, October 7, 2:01 PM

In one of the more bizarre plays of the season, Minnesota Vikings kicker Will Reichard's attempt to tie last week's game against Cleveland with a 51-yard field goal abruptly sliced and missed wide right -- but with good reason. The Athletic reported and video appears to confirm the Vikings' belief that the ball actually struck one of the overhead wires, at which point the down should have been replayed. Minnesota came back to win anyway, but fantasy managers who started Reichard had some awful luck, as a high-scoring field goal that initially looked good ended up as a miss, and the officiating crew missed the reason why. From a fantasy perspective, Reichard has been a nice surprise in spite of a Vikings offense ravaged by injuries, going for 11-for-11 on PATs and 8-for-8 on field goals that were not blocked by objects in the field of play.