Kickers get cut after one bad night. Quarterbacks get four more years after a losing season. Same league, wildly different standards
A kicker misses two field goals in a game and it is genuinely common for that kicker to be released within days, sometimes before the team has even landed back home. A starting quarterback can throw for a losing record, multiple bad seasons even, and still get handed a new contract and another shot the following year because the position is considered too hard to solve quickly. Both are specialists whose job success is measured in a small number of high-pressure attempts. Only one of them gets treated like the attempts are a fair sample size. Part of this is a real, defensible difference: a quarterback touches the ball fifty times a game and a kicker touches it four or five times, so a quarterback's bad plays get buried in a much larger body of evidence about what he's actually capable of. But that explanation only goes so far, because kickers who miss the exact same percentage of attempts as a quarterback misses completions don't get anywhere close to the same patience, even accounting for the smaller sample. The deeper issue is that a missed field goal is uniquely, visibly attributable to one player in a way most football failures aren't. A blown coverage has eleven possible culprits. A missed kick has exactly one name attached the instant it happens, and that visibility, not the actual value of the position, is what's driving how disposable kickers have become. [NFL.com's own profile of the position](https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-kicker-the-most-perilous-and-pitiless-position-in-sports-0ap3000000964697) calls it exactly that: the most perilous job in the sport.