The Rams Fired the ‘Thiccer Kicker’ in Less Than 24 Hours

There is a special kind of cruel in the NFL, and on Monday night it wore a kicker’s jersey. Harrison Mevis lined up a 48-yard field goal in overtime, a kick that would have ended the game, beaten the Buffalo Bills, and saved the Rams’ night. Seconds later the ball was tumbling sideways off Buffalo’s Greg Rousseau, the overtime died, and Mevis was walking off the field at SoFi Stadium while the crowd noise told him everything he needed to know. Standing there in the lights, he probably knew his Tuesday was going to hurt worse than the loss.

He was right. Before the day was over, the Los Angeles Rams had cut him.

It was not one bad kick. It was two, in the same game, in the most important game of the Rams’ young season.

One night, two misses, zero mercy

The first came in the opening quarter: a 50-yard attempt that sailed no good. The second came in overtime with everything on the line. After Buffalo running back James Cook fumbled on the opening possession of the extra period, the Rams had the ball and the win was sitting there. Mevis set up from 48 yards. Rousseau got a hand on it. Instead of a walk-off winner, the Rams watched Buffalo march 35 yards on five plays and watched Tyler Bass drill a 45-yarder to win it 37-34.

Mevis, to his credit, did not hide from it.

“I felt like I hit it good,” he said afterward. “That’s all I can tell you. I mean, I hit it good, gave it a chance. I’ll have to look.”

Replays were less kind. Early in the ball’s flight it looked like the kick might have been drifting left anyway, even without Rousseau’s block. That detail does not make the firing any fairer or crueler. It just makes it final.

McVay did not wait long to make the call

Sean McVay was visibly furious after the loss dropped his club to 2-3, a record nobody expected from a team widely picked to reach Super Bowl 61 in its own stadium. His postgame comments sounded like a man writing someone’s exit papers out loud.

“In the kicking game, especially with our PAT, field goal, not even close to good enough,” McVay said. “It cost us the game tonight.”

Asked whether he would reevaluate everything about the operation, he answered: “Yeah, I’m going to evaluate everything.”

He did not need long to reach a decision. On Tuesday, the Rams waived Mevis and signed Blake Grupe off the New York Jets’ practice squad, a move first reported by NFL Network insiders. Grupe, 27, has played 50 NFL games for the Saints and Colts, converting 86 of 105 field goals and 96 of 98 extra points, including a 60-yarder for Indianapolis last season. He was claimed by the Jets off waivers in August and never kicked for them.

A Buffalo Bills defender rises to block a game-winning overtime field goal attempt in a packed night stadium

Who the Thiccer Kicker is, and why the internet cared

If you followed college football at all in 2023, you know Harrison Mevis. The 24-year-old is 5-foot-11 and 243 pounds, built like a linebacker, kicking like a sniper. The nickname came from his Missouri days: the Thiccer Kicker, the heavyset hero with the monster leg.

He earned it the loud way. In September 2023, with Missouri tied against Kansas State, Mevis booted a 61-yard game-winner that turned him into a folk hero in Columbia and a meme everywhere else. College kickers are not supposed to look like him or kick like him. He did both.

The Rams signed him midway through last season to replace Joshua Karty, and at first it looked like they had found a keeper. Mevis converted 12 of 13 field goals and all 39 of his extra points. He went 6 for 6 in the playoffs. His only miss of the entire year came in a one-point overtime loss to Seattle, the team that went on to win the Super Bowl. He had never missed an extra point in his NFL career. Not one.

Here is the file the Rams were looking at when they made the call:

The nickname: the Thiccer Kicker, born at Missouri, beloved far beyond it.
The signature kick: a 61-yard game-winner against Kansas State in 2023.
The good year: 12 of 13 field goals, 39 of 39 extra points in 2025, plus a 6-for-6 playoff run.
The bad month: 5 of 9 field goals in 2026, a 55.6 percent conversion rate that ranked dead last in the NFL.
The resume line nobody wants: his four missed field goals through five games were the most by any kicker in the league this season.

The internet noticed immediately. By Tuesday afternoon, his name was the top trending sports search in the country, with more than 500,000 searches. The Thiccer Kicker had become a story bigger than the game he lost.

The brutal math of being an NFL kicker

Here is the thing nobody says out loud about this job: the evaluation window is about six kicks wide. Mevis missed one of two attempts in Week 4 and missed his only attempt in Week 2. He went 4 for 4 in Week 3, which nobody remembers, because nobody remembers the ones that go through.

And the Rams’ problems are bigger than one kicker. They have now had both of the league’s walk-off field goal attempts blocked across the past two seasons: Karty’s against Philadelphia last year, Mevis’s against Buffalo on Monday. Buffalo opened Monday’s game with a 70-yard kick return. The protection unit is part of this story, whatever McVay’s press conference said.

There is also a longer shadow. Including the playoffs, the Rams have had 81 kicks either missed or blocked since 2017, the third most in the NFL. Mevis was their fifth kicker in five seasons since they won Super Bowl 56. The position has been a revolving door for years. Mevis just happened to be the one standing in front of it when the door swung again.

And here is the irony the internet immediately seized on: the replacement is not exactly Mr. Automatic. Grupe went 18 for 26 on field goals in 2023, a 69.2 percent mark that would get most kickers fired. Teams do not always trade up at this position. Sometimes they just trade one shaky leg for another and hope the uniform changes the luck.

Harrison Mevis kicks for Missouri in black and gold under stadium lights

What happens to Mevis now

The good news for Mevis, if you can call it that, is that he is 24, healthy, and his leg is real. Kickers bounce around this league like pinballs. Somewhere, a special teams coordinator is watching the tape of the 2023 Kansas State kick and the 6-for-6 playoff run and thinking about a workout. It happens every year. The NFL’s cruelest position is also its most forgiving, eventually.

The bad news is the part nobody talks about: the next team will know exactly how this ends if it goes wrong. That is the deal now. Every kicker in the league watched what happened on Tuesday and did the mental math on their own last miss.

It was, by any measure, a strange night at SoFi Stadium. Josh Allen’s wife, actress Hailee Steinfeld, got caught on live television screaming an f-bomb cheer that went viral on its own. Rams star Aaron Donald’s awkward pregame kiss with his teenage daughter pulled 1.6 million views. And then a 24-year-old folk hero lined up a kick, watched it get blocked, and lost his job before the sun came up.

The NFL does not do goodbyes. It does transactions. But somewhere in Missouri, a fanbase that watched a kid boot a 61-yarder into history is watching the waiver wire and hoping the next chapter is kinder than this one.