Most kickers compare kicking to golf as it's all about being in rhythm, but not Patriots rookie Quinn Nordin.
The Michigan product prefers cornhole and NASCAR.
“I like to relate kicking to cornhole,” Nordin said to reporters Thursday. “When I set up, I kind of lean a little bit, try to take all the motion out of it. Cornhole and NASCAR — those are two things I compare kicking to. Throwing (while playing cornhole) is like the mechanics of kicking — being smooth, a repeatable motion, at a very small target. And then mentally, when you’re driving around a NASCAR track, you have to stay focused the whole time.
“There’s a saying (that) if you put a robot in a car, it would be able to do the same thing around a track a million times in a row, but when you put a person in a car, sometimes it can’t — one lap’s faster, one lap’s slower. So I guess to me, why is it when you make a machine kick a football, it goes in every time, but when a person does it, there’s errors and stuff like that?”
While Nordin is on the 53-man roster, we'll see if he ultimately kicks in Week 1 against the Dolphins, as Nick Folk signed to the practice squad this week and there's always the chance he gets elevated.
“I’m just focused on today,” he said. “Today we had a lot of situational football, and I was focused on, how can I have the best practice today? What can I do from our last practice to now to get better?
“I’m going to go into the (bye) weekend, enjoy a couple of days off, kind of refresh the body, but when Monday comes, I’m going to worry about Monday. Then get to Tuesday, and hopefully I get to the end of the week.”
The Patriots will host Miami Sept. 12.
