When the Kansas City Chiefs selected kicker Ryan Succop with the last pick in the 2009 NFL draft, he became the latest “Mr. Irrelevant.” However, his career has been anything but irrelevant since then.
And that fact was further cemented when the former Tennessee Titans kicker was on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers team that, interestingly enough, defeated his old squad, the Chiefs, in Super Bowl LV.
Succop became the first “Mr. Irrelevant” in NFL history to be play on a Super Bowl-winning team, and the second to play in the big game, according to Grant Gordon of NFL.com.
The only other player selected with the final pick in a draft to play on a team in the Super Bowl was linebacker Marty Moore, who was taken by the New England Patriots in 1994 and was part of the Super Bowl XXXI team.
It was quite a resurgence for Succop in 2020 after his struggles because of a knee issue in 2019 led to his being cut by the Titans the following offseason.
The kicker eventually signed with the Bucs and posted the second-best field goal success rate of his career (90.3) during the regular season, and then went on to make all nine of his field goals, including one in the big game, and all but one of his 13 extra point tries in the playoffs.
Succop is set to become a free agent in 2021, and while we’d like to see a reunion between he and the Titans in Nashville, chances are the Bucs are going to push hard to retain him.
