The Detroit Lions have spent the first month of 2026 living on the edge, and Jake Bates has been a big reason they’re still standing at 2-2.
Detroit’s four games have been decided by a combined eight points, which leaves very little room for error. Bates hasn’t given the Lions any.
He’s 21-for-21 on field goals and extra points, one of just 12 kickers to enter Week 5 with a perfect mark. The only kicker with more makes is Cowboys specialist Brandon Aubrey, who has 22 made kicks but has also missed three field goals and one extra point.
That reliability shows up in FanSided’s new kicking metric, Kick Value Added, which debuted before the season as a way to measure how much a kicker helps or hurts a team. The idea is simple: not all misses carry the same weight, and not every make should be treated equally.
KVA assigns value based on the difficulty and impact of the kick, with positive numbers meaning added value and negative numbers meaning the opposite. A zero is average.
Through four weeks, Bates has been one of the league’s better kickers by that measure. He ranks 10th in KVA at 2.62. His average made kick in 2026 is 35.4 yards, a reflection of how often the Lions’ offense has been able to move the ball into scoring range.
There’s another layer to this, too: most of the kickers sitting near the top of the KVA leaderboard are not doing it for winning teams. Only four of the top 10 are on clubs with winning records.
That makes Bates’ value in Detroit even clearer. In a season where the Lions keep finding themselves in tight games, every clean finish matters, and Bates has been part of the reason they’ve been able to squeeze out points when they need them most.
It’s also a sharp turnaround from last season. In 2025, Bates missed a career-high seven field goals and went 4-for-9 on attempts from at least 50 yards. His 79.4 field goal percentage ranked 32nd out of 39 kickers.
The Lions do not need a perfect kicker to win a Super Bowl, as Jason Myers showed with the Seattle Seahawks last season. Myers ranked 22nd with an 85.4 field goal percentage. But for this Detroit team, which needs as many points as it can get while its defense works things out, Bates has to stay close to flawless.
That challenge continues Sunday in Arizona, where the Lions face the Cardinals at 4:25 p.m. ET. The retractable roof at State Farm Stadium could be another plus for Bates if Detroit needs him to keep the streak going.
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