49ers DE Sam Okuayinonu not on team flight to Australia, questionable with foot injury

The New York Jets are working out multiple kickers, per NBC Sports, with Justin Tucker among the candidates. The move signals acute roster instability at a position the team had assumed was settled. With the regular season beginning in days, this is not the leisurely evaluation phase of training camp; it's triage.

Tucker, 41, hasn't kicked in the NFL since 2022. His presence on the workout sheet tells you how dire the Jets' options have become. A team doesn't dust off a retired Hall of Famer unless the alternative—using what's currently on the roster—creates more liability than the risk of deploying someone completely removed from game competition. The Jets' kicker room has either collapsed due to injury, underperformance in preseason, or both. Without explicit confirmation of the primary kicker's status, the fact that management is literally calling numbers at the bottom of the contact list suggests confidence in the current depth chart has evaporated.

Kicker performance carries outsized volatility in close games, and the Jets' Super Bowl window depends on execution in tight contests. Field goal production—both volume and reliability—trickles into team total markets, spread sensitivity in single-digit lines, and end-zone TD probability. A kicker who misses 20% more than expected or who creates hesitation in late-game decision-making (fourth down vs. field goal calculus) can swing multiple props across a game card. The market has already priced base team totals and spreads; it has not yet absorbed the specific reliability discount attached to whoever ultimately handles place-kick duties this Sunday. If the Jets activate an aging Tucker or another makeshift option, that's a real deviation from assumed execution rates baked into preseason projections.

For prop purposes, the angle is negative optionality: assume the Jets' kicker situation deteriorates their overall offensive efficiency in close situations. Tight-game scenarios—one-score leads, clock management in the final two minutes—expose inconsistent kicking more than blowouts do. This creates a structural underlay on Jets team totals and point spreads when they're favored by fewer than 7 points; the kicker liability compresses margin-of-victory profiles. Conversely, if the Jets' defense plays exceptionally well and games become blowouts, the kicker problem becomes moot. But the central risk is that marginal games—the ones that swing 3-7 points on a field goal—will be decided by a leg rather than the quality of play, and that leg is now demonstrably suspect.