Well, after UGA Butker is my personal king of the mountain, and I hope he has a long and very profitable career, but maybe a step back and a deep breath is the RX for all of us. It is one game and one kick -- a big one, yes, but one kick -- and there is a reason he hasn't stuck, or the NFL thinks there is. (I grant you, the NFL makes the Tea Party look socialist in philosophy, but the coaches are paid to win and will be slow to be stupid.) They are cheap with them for the same reason colleges don't give scholarships for them, and if they do it is only for the very top of the crop. The rest they get by encouraging walk-ons with temptations of a scholarship if they work out. In other words, a tryout of a year or more. (Clemson, whose recruiting I think is the best in the ACC and maybe as good as Alabama nationally, now potentially has a kicking problem because their No. 1 guy got hurt. Know how they came to have him him? Dabo had a campus-wide tryout. You can't make this stuff up.)
But a major part of the reason they are slow to give scholarships to kickers is their utter unpredictability: from HS to college, from tee to grass, from fair sized D linemen to monsters ... The judgment on a kicker is always "Who knows?" Yes, the good ones are worth it. It's finding the good one that's the trick. (Didn't that really good one from FSU just get dropped by a pro team? But maybe it was his tackling.)