Joshua
Karty.
Joshua
Karty.
Stanford· 6'2"· 207 lb
"Karty is the rare college kicker you draft for the operation and not the highlight: same tempo at 24 yards and 54, and a kickoff leg that changes where a defense starts its day."Pre-draft read
Karty is a pure placekicker with a compact, rhythmic operation — short approach, quiet upper body, and a strike that gets the ball off the ground quickly without a long wind-up. The value trait is repeatability: the tempo does not change from a 24-yarder to a 54-yarder, which is why his charted misses read as direction rather than distance.
The leg is legitimately NFL-plus. He showed comfortable range past 55 and banked touchbacks at a high rate on kickoffs, which gave Stanford a hidden-yardage weapon on a team that badly needed one. What separates him is temperament: he kicked for offenses that gave him no margin and his stroke never sped up in tight games. The trade-off is a flatter ball flight that lives closer to the line than most.
Any placekicking operation that needs a combined field-goal and kickoff leg on one roster spot, ideally in a controlled or mild-weather environment.
Year 1: the outright starting kicker handling both field goals and kickoffs, with touchback rate as much of the value as the field-goal chart. Ceiling: a decade-long starter whose kickoff leg quietly wins field position every week.
An open-air cold-weather stadium with heavy December wind and a leaky interior on the field-goal unit — the flat trajectory that gets blocked indoors gets knocked down outdoors, and the margin disappears.
The kickoff value is the part that keeps him employed when the field-goal chart wobbles.
2024 NFL Draft Prospect Joshua Karty
Pre-draft scouting reel on the leg strength and operation at Stanford.
Joshua Karty Mixtape | 2024 NFL Draft
Career highlight mixtape cut after the Rams selected him.
All Joshua Karty field goal attempts in his NFL debut (All-22)
All-22 look at every attempt from his first NFL game.
Karty entered the 2024 class as the most decorated kicker on the board and one of the few specialists teams would spend real draft capital on. He is a compact, technically clean placekicker with a fast strike, a stable plant leg, and enough raw leg to handle both field goals and kickoffs at an NFL level — a combined role that matters more now that touchback rate is a roster argument.
The production backed the projection. He was perfect in 2022 at 18-for-18 on field goals, then set a Stanford single-season record with 23 makes in 2023. His career line read 51-for-60 on field goals and 72-for-73 on extra points for 225 points, all inside a program that rarely handed him a comfortable score. Back-to-back first-team All-Pac-12 honors and Lou Groza finalist and semifinalist recognition were the résumé; the kickoff numbers, with touchbacks climbing past 80 percent as a senior, were the part scouts liked most.
The flags were the usual kicker flags: a flat ball that invites blocks, and a body of work in mild West Coast conditions that left cold-weather projection open. Boards had him as the class's top kicker, and the Rams — carrying a genuine kicking vacancy — spent pick 209 there rather than gamble on the undrafted pool.
- 01
Repeatable operation
Short approach and a quiet upper body give him the same tempo on a chip shot and a 54-yarder, which is why his ball placement stays consistent under pressure.
- 02
Kickoff leg
Banked touchbacks at better than 80 percent as a senior, giving him real two-phase value rather than field-goal-only utility.
- 03
Accuracy record
Went 18-for-18 in 2022 and finished 51-for-60 for his career, an 85 percent hit rate against a schedule that gave him few easy kicks.
- 04
Situational nerve
Kicked for offenses that lost far more than they won and never let the score or the crowd speed up his strike or shorten his follow-through.
- 05
Extra point reliability
Missed exactly one PAT in his entire college career, the kind of automatic baseline coaching staffs treat as a floor, not a bonus.
- 01
Flat ball flight
His trajectory gets to the line quickly but stays low, which is a block risk against interior push and shortens his margin on tight snaps.
- 02
Weather questions
Nearly all of his tape came in mild West Coast conditions, leaving cold, wind, and December footing genuinely unproven at the time of the draft.
- 03
Long-range volume
He rarely got sent out past 50, so the deep range was more a warmup and pro-day claim than a body of live, graded evidence.
- 04
No fallback role
He does not punt or hold, so there is zero roster flexibility if the field-goal operation goes sideways for a stretch.
| Yr | Team | G | FGM | FGA | FG% | XPM | XPA | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Stanford | 1 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2021 | Stanford | 11 | 10 | 15 | 66.7 | 27 | 27 | 57 |
| 2022 | Stanford | 12 | 18 | 18 | 100 | 24 | 25 | 78 |
| 2023 | Stanford | 12 | 23 | 27 | 85.2 | 21 | 21 | 90 |
| Career | — | 36 | 51 | 60 | 85 | 72 | 73 | 225 |
Verified against cfbstats.com Stanford place-kicking pages for 2020-2023; season sums match the career line exactly (51/60 FG, 72/73 XP, 225 points). 2020 was the COVID-shortened season: Karty appeared in one game with no field-goal or extra-point attempts recorded, so those cells are null rather than zero per Rule 0x. Kickoff touchback rate rose from 75.0 percent (2021) to 72.7 percent (2022) to 81.5 percent (2023).
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Drafted for the leg, wins a starting job early, then rides accuracy variance between roles rather than locking one down.
The version where the compact stroke holds up for a decade and the kickoff leg makes him a two-phase asset every year.
Competent leg who bounces between rosters as the emergency answer instead of ever owning the job outright.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
The Rams handed him the job immediately and he mostly justified it. As a rookie in 2024 he played all 17 games, hit 29 of 34 field goals and 32 of 36 extra points for 119 points, drilled a 58-yard career long against Seattle in Week 18, and was named NFC Special Teams Player of the Month for December. He then went 4-for-4 on field goals and 5-for-5 on extra points across two playoff games. For a sixth-round specialist, that is the outcome you draft for.
Year two undid it. Karty opened 2025 as the starter and cratered, sitting at 10-for-15 on field goals through eight games — briefly the worst field-goal percentage in the league — with a blocked kick and a blocked extra point that fed exactly the flat-trajectory concern from his draft profile. Los Angeles brought in Harrison Mevis, Mevis won the job, and the Rams waived Karty in late November before re-signing him to the practice squad days later. Arizona signed him to the active roster in December and brought him back on a one-year deal in April 2026. The honest read: the leg and the mechanics were always real, and the 2024 season proved the projection, but the accuracy variance that his flat ball always threatened arrived in year two and cost him a starting job he had earned.
Data note: Verified against cfbstats.com Stanford place-kicking pages for 2020-2023; season sums match the career line exactly (51/60 FG, 72/73 XP, 225 points). 2020 was the COVID-shortened season: Karty appeared in one game with no field-goal or extra-point attempts recorded, so those cells are null rather than zero per Rule 0x. Kickoff touchback rate rose from 75.0 percent (2021) to 72.7 percent (2022) to 81.5 percent (2023).