So simple, even a child could ... ouch!
It was a big weekend for the men who put the foot in football, and for a reminder of what a rare skill they have.
While I jogged a few laps at Pierce College in Woodland Hills on Sunday, a man and a boy about 10 years old were practicing field-goal kicking on the field. That is, the man was holding 20 yards from the goalposts and his son was applying his right instep to the ball. The kid must have knocked a few over the bar and between the uprights, but the attempts I saw died in the wind and spun dead in the grass.
For a natural human act, kicking is surprisingly hard.
That was me as a kid, practicing field goals by teeing the ball up on the sidewalk and aiming north between our shrubs and the neighbors' ivy. In those days "soccer-style" kicking hadn't entirely taken over, and I couldn't decide if I was Jim Bakken or Jan Stenerud. Usually I was Bakken until my toes got sore.
Usually the football wound up under a car.
Some people would like to eliminate place kicking -- and, presumably, punting as well -- from American football rules. Words & Numbers would like to see more of it, and not only to justify the sport's name.
There's nothing in football that's as hard to do under game-deciding pressure as kicking a ball straight and far.
Hats off (hats with single-bar facemasks) to the four NFL kickers who won games with playoff implications on Sunday: Cleveland's Phil Dawson, beating Kansas City from 33 yards in overtime; Seattle's Josh Brown, beating Denver from 50 with :05 on the clock (Brown's fourth last-minute game-winner of the season); Dallas' Martin Gramatica, beating the New York Giants from 46 at :01 (his third go-ahead kick in his first game for the Cowboys), and Tennessee's Rob Bironas, stunning Indianapolis from 60 at :07 (the sixth 60-yard-plus field goal in NFL history).
Saturday's UCLA upset of USC turned on kicks, too: Justin Medlock's third- and fourth-quarter field goals gave the Bruins their 13-9 margin, and Aaron Perez's spiraling 63-yard punt in the final seconds ended the Trojans' hope of a miracle.
Delivering the punt of your life when a dropped snap, a block or a shank could give the game away? That was the underrated gutsy play of a true football weekend.
Update: David Akers kicks a 25-yard field goal with 3:13 left and Philadelphia beats Carolina 27-24 in the Monday night game.