Here is the reason I think that Harbaugh is so desperately seeking a Kicker before the playoffs. The list in this link is all Kickers in the NFL sorted by percent completion in descending order. Here we see David Akers second from the bottom. We can also see that near the top are the kickers of most of the other playoff teams, some of whom will be our competition. As you can see we simply do not compete with the other playoff teams when it comes to field goal percentage, in fact we have by far the worst odds of success in that category.

Kickers in the NFL and Percentage Completion