Small sample sizes are often fun because they allow us to make sweeping generalizations about the grandest nonsense while being able to say two weeks from now that we were, all together now, "dealing with a small sample size."
But in the National Football League, where every week is inflated to a potential national crisis, everything is a small sample size. Thus, we are giving you a heads-up now, while you're still just settling in: The Anti-Kickers Brigade is rising again, and they're going to be more obnoxiously dissatisfied than ever before. The reason? Kicking's never been better, and it's never been more beloved by coaches.
Better still, long field goals—you know, 50 yards and beyond—are the highest form of game-enhancing strategy for the increasing number of coaches who kind of hate their quarterbacks. There is a growing fraternity of sweatshirts and whistles who have already flirted with 66-yard-plus attempts on three occasions before weenieing out at the last moment. But that barrier is destined to fall too as the game becomes incrementally more foot-based and coaches decide they'd rather stay employed than pretend some 32-year-old free agent will save them from the drive of shame.
Through two weeks minus Falcons-Eagles, kickers are converting their field goals at nearly 92 percent, an all-time record for accuracy. They're also kicking more per game on average than ever before and kicking from longer distances than at any time in history—including 35 of 39 so far from 50 yards and beyond. Don't pretend to be shocked; the most 50-yarders ever attempted, let alone made, was last year, breaking the old record of the year before that.
In short, coaches love kickers as never before, and if Peyton Manning were playing today (a) our viewing habits would be less annoyingly cluttered, and (b) he wouldn't be calling his kicker an idiot, as he did here 22 years ago. He'd be a damned sight more respectful, because he'd need that kicker to bail his ass out of a late-game jackpot.
This news will cause the football recidivists in the audience to demand rule changes that start with banning kicking entirely and end with sending all kickers to a farm to spend the rest of their days picking turnips with their feet. But if they want to get rid of kickers, they could do it the way the NFL likes best—with technology. Specifically, with revolving goal posts that spin just slowly enough to make a kick possible but just fast enough to make it significantly more difficult than it is now. Sure, that makes life less fun for Harrison Butker, but that's a price half the population is more than willing to pay.
Here, we like the physical safety of a field goal just as is it. Moreover, watching traditionalists turn all purply and sclerotic because they don't like something trivial is the best football entertainment of all.
-Ray Ratto
Photo: Michael Owens/Getty Images
