'It's a new era': How college football kickers are setting records this season - ESPN

Back home in Flowery Branch, Georgia, Maddux Trujillo's parents were a wreck, watching from their living room as their son trotted onto the field, just seconds left in the first half of Temple's game against Utah State. But he had none of those nerves. The Owls had gotten the ball with just 5 seconds to play, hit an 11-yard completion and called timeout with a single tick remaining. The ball was four yards beyond midfield.

Trujillo's special teams coach, Adam Scheier, had given him a look and posed the obvious question: «Is it too far?»

The kick would be a 64-yard attempt. That week, Trujillo had made a 62-yarder in practice with room to spare, but that really didn't matter. He wanted this chance, whether it was too far or not.

Then he looked at the goalposts from his starting point, nearly 70 yards away, and the scope of the situation finally landed.

«I go out there and look at it and think, 'That's pretty far,'» Trujillo said. «In practice it looked a lot shorter.»

Looking back, Trujillo insists he didn't connect with the ball as well as he would have liked. He called it a B, B+ kick, and when it left his foot, he assumed it was a bad miss. But the ball kept sailing through the air, spinning right to left, eventually hooking just inside the right upright, clanging off the crossbar and through for three points.

The kick was the longest made field goal at the FBS level in 16 years and just a yard shy of the modern record — an era from 1992 until now — set by Martin Gramatica in 1998. (Prior to 1989, kickers used tees for field goals.) It was the longest field goal made — in college or the NFL — at Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles.

Ove Johansson of Abilene Christian holds the mark for the longest