Other than sharing a tall and slender build, the Penguins' Matt Murray is nothing like the Steelers' Chris Boswell. Like, zero. Murray is a goalie, not a kicker, and is in no position to advise Boswell about kicking a ball any more than Boswell is of telling him how to stop a puck.
But he also makes his living as a fellow professional athlete in Pittsburgh and, well, he doesn't live under a rock, either. He's aware Boswell has struggled to start this season. It's been one of the more confounding subplots to the Steelers' 1-1-1 start.
Like Boswell, Murray has had far more ups than downs in his relatively brief career. But, yeah, there have been times where he hasn't performed up to his own high standard.
Hockey and football might be apples and oranges, but the mindset isn't all that different for a goalie and a kicker. They essentially play an individual sport within the context of a team game. The spotlight shines white hot on their respective positions. Make one small mistake, be an inch off here or there, and it's magnified for all the world to see. In sports-obsessed Pittsburgh, a goalie is only as good as his last save, a kicker only as good as his last field goal.
What does Murray do to get his game back on track?
"Just get back to the basics, get back to your fundamentals and just try to simplify," Murray was telling our Cody Tucker the other day. "That's what you always try to do: Try to get back to your fundamentals and make sure those are solid and you can build from there."
As strange as it sounds, that's actually spot-on advice if you ask a pair of former Steelers kickers. Jeff Reed and Shaun Suisham have both experienced the highs and lows that come with the job.
In some circles, kickers aren't viewed as "real" football players, whatever that means. Typically a kicker might have six to eight plays -- field goals and extra points -- in a game. The operation of snap, hold and kick should take just 1.3 seconds. But, man, they are a crucial 1.3 seconds. They account for 30 percent of all scoring.
"Kicking in the National Football League is a simple task, but that doesn't mean it's easy," said Suisham, who had been released after stints in Dallas and Washington before playing his final five seasons in Pittsburgh, a place he still calls home. "Kickers miss. It's part of the job, unfortunately. And it is a mental grind at times. And the guys that stick around the league work their way through it."
Reed won a pair of Super Bowl rings here and converted 81.9 percent of his field goals, but if he missed? You better believe he'd hear about it.
"It's tough to get out and go eat dinner when you're just not kicking your best," Reed was saying. "I lived it."
Boswell is living it now.
The 27-year-old had made a team-record 89.5 percent of his career field goals entering the season to earn a five-year extension worth nearly $20 million in August. But he is just 1-of-4 this season while missing on two of 11 extra points.
Is he pressing? Is it in his head?
"It's just a matter of him getting into a rhythm and taking the pressure off himself," Reed says. "He's put way too much pressure on himself because he got a big contract that he well deserved. It's all mental."
Could it be injury? Could it be the wet field conditions that the Steelers saw in Cleveland and Tampa?
"The sweet spot for a kicker when you settle in, is when the stadium, the fans, the environment has no significance, no impact on your kick. That's the good spot," Suisham says. "That's where you want to be as a kicker. There's times when, for me, maybe you have some sort of nagging injury. Or think about it like golf, where a stroke isn't quite what it usually is and you have to find a way to get through it. And I'm certainly not suggesting that's what going on for Chris. You're going to miss and some times a few of them pile up together early in the season."
Each miss though has brought a growing public outcry followed by public votes of confidence from Mike Tomlin and Danny Smith.
"He's a good player that's not playing good," the special teams coordinator said Thursday. "We've got to get it fixed."
All the while sports talk radio shows and comment boards are filled with messages imploring the Steelers to cut bait with their Pro Bowl kicker. "Josh Scobee was released after missing 4-of-10 field goals in 2015," they say.
Well, that's not going to happen. At least not anytime soon. Kickers have traditionally been on shorter leashes and have been discarded like yesterday's garbage, but cutting Boswell at this point would result in nearly $5 million in dead money next season.
Ultimately, it's up to Boswell to sort it out on his own. The life of a kicker can be a solitary existence. There is no kicker's coach (Smith, a defensive back in his playing days, holds the all-encompassing title of special teams coordinator). Boswell works closely with punter/holder Jordan Berry and long snapper Kameron Canaday, but there is no back-up kicker on the roster.
If Boswell continues to struggle though, one can be easily found in free agency. It's how Boswell got the job from Scobee, who got the job after Suisham went down with a career-ending knee injury.
"There's pressure on you every time you go on the field because there's 20 guys on the street that are watching you and not hoping and praying you miss -- because you shouldn't be that kind of person -- but if you do miss, it's an opportunity for him," Reed said. "He doesn't have a backup, he's got 20 backups. That's the way that business rolls."
Reed just doesn't envision that scenario unfolding in Pittsburgh this season. Boswell is not Daniel Carlson, the Vikings kicker who was released after a disastrous performance in Week 2 cost Minnesota a win against Green Bay.
"You're seeing Boswell's hitting the uprights and he missed by an inch in Cleveland, that's it," Reed said. "Just very, very minimal human error. You see some of the guys, like the kicker in Minnesota who got released, he's not even close. Those kicks aren't even close. His mentality, he's whacked, he's gone. Boswell knows what he's done, he's proven himself. It's just a slow start. He'll prove that very soon. Hopefully this week."
As Suisham says, judge Boswell on his three years, not three weeks.
"He's having a rough start, yes, but there's a reason that they look at averages at the end of the year and I anticipate, once the dust settles at the end of the year, that you're going to see Chris Boswell with a percentage rate that's been similar to his first three years," Suisham said. "I like Chris. I anticipate Chris kicking for another 10 years in the National Football League. I'm at home cheering him and the Steelers on."