With the way Kansei Matsuzawa kicked in the preseason for the Raider, you wonder how he was ever brought in this offseason, let alone why they held onto him on the team's practice squad.
After all, he was given four chances in the first two games to put the ball in the uprights, and he connected just once on an extra point. He missed two other extra points and a 38-yard field goal. And his one kickoff went just 41 yards and was short of the landing zone for a penalty. He was held out of the preseason finale. You simply don't have much worse a preseason performance than that.
The answer to this conundrum shows us why we should never read too much into preseason games because they don't tell nearly the whole story.
For that, the Raiders GM John Spytek explained why Kansei was brought back onto the team's practice squad.
"Well, we obviously knew from the start this was a developmental player, and he's fairly new to the kicking game, and we saw a lot of quality work from Kansei [Matsuzawa] in practice," said Spytek. "He kicked well, and so the next step is obviously when the bright lights are on and it really matters. It's kind of like going to the driving range, everybody can rip 400 yard drives you feel like on the driving range, but then when you're standing out there and there's water on the left and out of bounds on the right, it gets a little harder. So that's the next step for Kansei. But we like the worker. We like how dedicated he is to his craft, and we're excited to keep working with him."
The man who earned the nickname "The Tokyo Toe" as a Japanese born kicker and because he won the Lou Groza Award at Hawaii last season, still doesn't have that proverbial ice in his veins. He was signed by the team that inspired him to pick up a football seven years ago. And he clearly was feeling the pressure of the moment.
Keeping him around also doesn't cost the Raiders a spot on the practice squad. His spot is reserved for the team's International Pathway Program (IPP) player. Making this the plan for some time.
The Raiders clearly liked him enough back in May to bring him in and some preseason nerves weren't changing that. From the looks of things, keeping Matsuzawa on the practice squad was the Raiders plan all along , barring him outshining all expectations early on.
This article originally appeared on Raiders Wire: GM details why Raiders kept Kansei Matsuzawa despite preseason struggles
