Sebastian Janikowski will miss at least half of the season with a back injury. The Raiders are replacing him for the time being with Giorgio Tavecchio, a former soccer player from Italy.
Janikowski is on injured reserve, so he’ll miss at least eight weeks.
Tavecchio, who’s 27, has kicked with the team in the preseason the last four years, converting 10 of 13 field goals and 19 of 21 extra points. He also was the kicker at Cal for four years, hitting 48 of 64 field goals (75 percent). His best season came as a senior in 2011, when he hit 20 of 23 field goals (he did, however, miss 6 extra points that year.) Tavecchio went to training camps in 2012 and 2013 with the 49ers and Packers.
He’ll need to prove he can handle the job, of course, but Tavecchio looks like he’ll might be a top-5 scorer in Week 2 – the Raiders open at home against a pretty punchless Jets team.
ADDITIONALLY ON THE KICKER FRONT
Carolina continues to have two kickers on its roster. Graham Gano is still on the 53-man roster, so his $3.05 million salary for 2017 is now guaranteed – either the Panthers will be pay it, or it will be paid by some other team that makes a trade for him. (Harrison Butker is also on the roster, but plans to transition to him are apparently on hold.) Coach Ron Rivera on Friday said that Gano will be the team’s kicker on Sunday in San Francisco.
“Probably the biggest thing more so than anything else is he’s a veteran,” Rivera said in an article in The Charlotte Observer. “He’s had a lot of success and we’re counting on him.”
Gano went only 3 of 5 on field goals in the preseason. The misses were 50- and 51-yard kicks that hit the upright.
—Ian Allan
