Kicking the Habit?
The Super Bowl matchups are now set with the St. Louis er, I mean Arizona Cardinals playing the Pittsburgh Steelers in Tampa Bay in two weeks. The Arizona Cardinals stemming from St. Louis to Chicago have finally kicked the habit! No more failing to reach the Super Bowl. They can finally shrugg of their “Clipper-esque” label. However, today’s post is not about how Arizona kicked the habit of losing which is by no means a small issue. Instead I’d like to discuss yesterday’s NFL conference championship “kicking.” Usually kicking is not important unless a field goal decides the game or a kick/punt return goes back for a touchdown. If you’ve noticed as I did yesterday, the kicking and punting aspects of the games were curiously awful and almost too surrealistic.
To begin, I’d like to start with the least woeful offender, Mitch Berger (and I’m only speaking about offenders; if you’re not on this list, you were a good kicker yesterday). He almost whiffed a punt at the end of the game (I think). Obviously the Pittsburgh-Baltimore game was the least enticing game to watch because I can’t remember the exact details. If he were a rookie, I’d give him a small reprieve but this guy has been in the league since the 1990’s. However, I don’t want to seem discriminitory toward “senior citizens” oops I mean “veterans” of the game therefore I did some background research. Guess what I found? He has spent most of his career in domes (Vikings, Colts, Saints). Maybe the cushy environment has something to say about his snow flurry cold day dinky punt.
The next biggesst offender was Neil Rackers. He’s the “least” experienced of the offenders so that gives him some mercy. He kicked the ball out of bounds by way of Eagles player Victor Abiamiri. If Abiamiri did not touch the ball, the Cardinals would have gotten the ball back and we might have been talking about a genius play by Ken Whisenhunt a.k.a. the “gadget plays” master. I’m not quite sure it is a designed play because Neil had at least another instance where he almost kicked it out of bounds during yesterday’s game. Again, sorry the details are hazy because it looked as though the game was over by halftime. Luckily for him, the referees forgot to give the standard 40-yard penalty for a kickoff out of bounds during their disscussion about the Abiamiri play.
The worse offender of this past weekend was David Akers. He’s a Pro Bowl kicker and should be “money”, but for some reason he almost kicked off like our friend Neil. Adding to the misery, he missed a 47 yard field goal (in a dome nonetheless). The dumbest play of them all though was a missed PAT. I mean how can that happen especially when your kicking from a distance closer then an NBA free throw. I know David is a good player and I might be heavy-handed with my words but irrespectively, you’re a Pro Bowl kicker earning at least a million dollars. You should be making those kicks! I guess you can see that I was rooting for Philadephia (see NFL Conference Playoff Sick’ems)
So why were the kicks so bad this past weekend? Were they intentional or just some coincidental bad luck? I think we might have come upon something more serious here. Maybe there’s a backhanded approach by Vegas. Why do you think I said that? Maybe a look at the Vegas odds might give you a HDTV-like picture. Did the kickers get paid off to alter the scores a bit and thus get in-/out of-line with the odds? I don’t know, but I’m sure it isn’t the first time we’ve thought about off the field gameplay tinkering. You be the judge.
Until we find the truth of the matter, I’d like to leave you with a tutorial on how to punt and kick:
