An Ode to Sebastian Janikowski, the Kicker Who Was Worth a First-Round Pick

The night Sebastian Janikowski was selected in the first round of the 2000 NFL draft, gasps filled Madison Square Garden.

These Raiders were on the verge of being good, yes, and they badly needed a leg: They went 8-8 in their 1999 campaign, never losing by more than seven points. But 17th overall? The second-highest pick ever for a kicker, and only the third to come in the first round? And someone with—how shall we put this—baggage? Al Davis is out of his mind, the football world agreed. Davis decreed him the next Ray Guy.

Nineteen years later, Janikowski, now 39, will leave the Raiders, who announced Wednesday that they do not plan to bring the Polish Cannon back for the 2018 season. To say he made good over his nearly two decades with the team is an understatement: He is the franchise’s all-time leading scorer, with more than double (1,799) the next-highest point total on that list (863). Pro Football Reference says he provided more value to the team that drafted him than all but 20 other players from his same draft class. He will exit the Raiders a witness and a key contributor to a nearly Homerian range of the team’s eras: the fire and frustration of the early aughts, the discord and jaw-snapping that followed, the gloom of a team forced to cover thousands of seats under tarps to prevent low-attendance television blackouts, the resurgence of the nascent Derek Carr era. More than anyone but Al’s son Mark, Janikowski is the through line of recent Raidersdom.

He came out of Florida State swathed in myth: a kicker who drew people just to watch his warm-ups, who was known to sail the ball through the goalposts on kickoffs, who could be found more often than not in one of Tallahassee’s Chinese buffets. As a child, he hustled pool players in bars in his native Poland, developing a taste for vodka at a young age. He grew up a soccer player and transitioned to football only after his father sent him a highlight tape titled “NFL’s Greatest Hits”; he moved to the U.S. at 15 and tried out for his high school football team in Daytona Beach in jeans and tennis shoes. He shaved his head, a tribute to a friend from the Polish juniors national soccer team, who died in a bus accident. At 6-foot-2, 255 pounds, and with a left leg like a tree trunk, Janikowski looked—and still looks—like a giant’s thumb.

In Oakland, he became something of a ghost of the team’s rowdier past. By the conclusion of the 2002 season, when the Raiders fell to the Buccaneers in the Super Bowl, Janikowski had been arrested seven times, including for possession of the drug GHB, an attempted $300 bribery of a police officer to get a buddy at Florida State out of trouble, and a DUI that found him with a blood alcohol concentration of .20. A rumor circulated before the 2003 Super Bowl that an infection on his foot that season was the result of a testicle piercing gone bad. Or else a tattoo. (“If there was a piercing there, I would know,” he told reporters.)

Janikowski’s leg made him a useful weapon against more than just his opponents: He was deployed by Lane Kiffin in 2008 in a proxy war with Davis, when Kiffin ordered Janikowski to attempt a 76-yard field goal to make a statement about the team’s lack of talent on offense. (It was Kiffin’s last official act as coach before being fired by Davis for insubordination.) The day after Davis died, Janikowski tied an NFL record with three 50-yard field goals in a single game. “He didn’t hit it good at all,” holder Shane Lechler said after Janikowski tied a then–NFL record with a 63-yard field goal in 2011. With Janikowski’s talent, there always seemed to be room for more.

Janikowski may play on: Though he missed the entirety of the 2017 season due to injury, three current NFL kickers—Matt Bryant (42), Phil Dawson (43), and Adam Vinatieri (45)—are older, and the Raiders’ no. 2 all-time scorer, George Blanda, played until he was 48. But we will not get to see Janikowski’s reunion with Jon Gruden, who was also the head coach of Janikowski’s first Raiders team, and we will not see him move with the team to Las Vegas in 2020. Instead, Janikowski’s accomplishments with the Silver and Black will be locked in amber, and he will remain always as he is now: as close as there is to the face of the Raiders’ second stint in Oakland.