Stephen Gostkowski

“It's a high-pressure situation to be in my position, but I've kind of gravitated toward those positions in sports. It's nothing that I worry too much about. I'm not going to act like I have the most stressful job in the world. This is pretty darn fun.”

“Soccer was probably the most fun game I've played because I never walked away feeling like I had a bad game. If you play a position in soccer where you can out-hustle or out-work or out-prepare somebody, it is a lot easier to walk away from the game and say, I gave it my all. I could always try. I could always hustle.”

“I don't do social media. I'm not looking to get a death threat every time I miss a field goal. I'm just not going to put myself through that.”

“No one puts more pressure on themselves than me as far as an individual thing.”

“I love kicking off. Just like anyone else, after a while, you're like, 'Man, I don't want to practice this.' But I love kicking off and I want to try to do it as long as I physically can do it.”

“You can miss a kick on a good hold and you can still make kicks with bad holds but the more the operation is perfect, the percentages go up and up.”

“I've made game-winners, I've missed game-winners. I've pitched shutouts, and I've given up 10 runs. You just deal with the experiences and learn how to get over the bad outings and learn from them, so they don't occur time and time again. You take what you did right from the good games and turn those into, 'How do I repeat that success?'”

“One thing I'll never do is panic.”

“Once you get a couple good plays, you get confidence and it carries over.”

“Any time I screw up I feel bad about it.”

“If I watch football, I just watch as a fan.”

“There's multitudes of factors of why a kick can go in or not.”

“The hardest thing about kicking field goals sometimes is you don't know when you're going to play. You don't know what situation you're going to be in. I remember in the Atlanta Super Bowl, it's two weeks of the biggest buildup of your life, and I didn't step on the field until there was two seconds left in the second quarter.”

“To have faith and confidence in someone in front of you just helps you attack the ball a lot better.”

“If you're a starting pitcher, the ball's in your hands and all eyes are you. And when you're kicking, either you missed it or you made it. So there's a lot of parallels in that.”

“You'll go down a dark road if you just dwell on every time you screw up. We play a very fickle position. If I make nine kicks out of 10, people are going to talk about the one I missed.”

“Every year means different challenges, different opportunities.”

“I try to take the mental aspects of every sport that I've ever played and use it toward kicking, how to react in certain situations.”

“I don't talk that much when I do well and I try to talk even less when I'm not doing well. All that really matters is the next game and helping us win.”