This should come as little surprise to those who have studied the broader American condition, but we often hate the very things that we should find most comforting and beneficial. No, we are not discussing vegetables. Those are objectively wrong no matter how they are prepared or justified. You cannot glaze your way to paradise, and something being good for you not only does not make it good, it often makes it a provable indecency.
Rather, we speak here of placekickers, who are all too often condemned as being an alien part of football. It doesn’t help that the best of them look like librarians, and that the nature of their job keeps them from engaging in enough sociopathic brain-on-brain contact to qualify for what we call football. In fact, though, kickers are not only vital to the sport in that they provide the only reliable scoreboard variations that make end-of-game chaos possible, but also because they provide us a level of bemusement that a thousand tush pushes can never satisfy.
(Oh, and while we're at it, shut up about the tush push. You're dead wrong in public about that, too. You want it gone? Innovate, don't legislate. Find a coach who can figure out how to make it a bad play and players who can prevent it from working. Waiting for The Ginger Hall Monitor to do it for you is just intellectually lazy and is acknowledging that he owns your decrepit soul.)
But we digress. Sunday was a great day for football because a whole lot of kicking happened. It would have been enough if this was just referring to what Philadelphia did to the Los Angeles Rams in an otherwise undeserved 33-26 win. The Eagles, who looked fully cooked and garnished for serving three minutes into the second half, scored 26 unanswered points down the stretch, including two touchdowns in the final two minutes, sparked in one case by a blocked field goal and assured at game's end by a second. Joshua Karty, the Rams kicker who got snuffed by Jalen Carter on the first blocked kick and then Jordan Davis, who scoop-and-scored on the second, may be unemployed by the time you read this; changing the kicker is the easiest termination this side of the catering staff. Someone must always be blamed, and those who called this the worst bad beat of the year are underselling it by about six decades. It all happened because the mere choice to kick a football throws open the door to the unexpected in a game that would otherwise self-strangle in formulaic strategies and mathematical options. If this reminder of kicking’s chaos element is Karty’s parting gift, it’s a very generous one.
Or take the opposite approach, as the New York Giants did in their 22-9 loss to Kansas City on Sunday night. They tried to win a game against a superior opponent with no kicker at all because Graham Gano, their antediluvian regular, was injured but active and his backup, punter Jamie Gillan, got a PAT blocked with both a head and a hand. The Giants would have lost anyway, of that we are quite certain. They absolutely Gianted the hell out of the game, but witnessing for-the-moment head coach Brian Daboll's agonies about how to steal a game without access to the necessary game-stealing tools created its own entertainment.
If watching the Giants is too much of an ask (and yes, it is), there are also the Jets, their conjoined twins in Satan's rec room, who took a late lead on a blocked field goal touchdown from Will McDonald IV (his name, not his postgame medical treatment) with 1:36 to play, only to lose to Tampa anyway because Chase McLaughlin kicked a 36-yarder at game's end, his fifth of the day, to give Tampa Bay its third successive last-minute victory—the Milwaukee Brewers on pixie dust. McLaughlin has missed three of his nine tries so far this year, the most of any currently employed kicker, which means that Bucs fans view him with equal parts trepidation and "Oh shit, not again." But hate-watching is part of the fun. It just means he’s a kicker.
The whole experience of this most kicking-forward of weekends can be summed up by the Los Angeles Chargers, who dominated the Denver Broncos but needed a game-winning 43-yarder from Cameron Dicker to win, 23-20. And yes, that is Cameron Dicker, or as he is known by every lazy play-by-play man the networks can thrust before us, "Dicker The Kicker." There is a message in that, and anti-kicking meat puppets can eat it with wasabi without anything to wash it down
And we almost forgot Cleveland, where the forlorn Browns are still more popular at their worst than the Guardians at their best, which is sufficient reason to condemn the town on its own. The Browns averted a winless season on Sunday first by blocking Green Bay kicker Brandon McManus' game-sealing 43-yarder and then winning the game themselves with a 55-yarder from rookie kicker Andre Szmyt, whose surname only looks like the result of dropping a can of peaches on the keyboard. The added benefit? Micah Parsons' first memorable moment as a Packer after being asked how to explain such a galling loss: "Sometimes, just like today, you shit the bed."
And therein lies the beauty of kicking. Football without that level of bed-fouling chaos is just a 32-way competition between medical cart drivers without the sponsorship decals on the hoods—or hoods, for that matter. Sunday was an ordinary day for kickers overall, to be honest—there were 65 attempts so far, with 13 misses, a lower than average 80 percent conversion rate, and two of the three attempts from beyond 60 yards failed, including a 62-yarder by Tennessee's Joey Slye that was blocked. Slye also missed a 64-yarder the conventional way, which suggests that the 60-plus attempt is no longer noteworthy, a statement that had previously been true only for the cartoonish leg of Dallas' Brandon Aubrey.
There was even a redemption story in San Francisco, where incumbent and 2023 third-round draft choice Jake Moody was fired and replaced with Eddy Piñeiro, who is now on his fourth team in six years despite an 88 percent conversion rate; he hit a 35-yarder with no time left to give the 49ers a 3-0 record despite preposterous injury problems, Mac Jones at quarterback, and a whopping plus-10 point differential. You can't get any of that sort of thing from Saquon Barkley alone, and it's a safe bet that this day Eagles fans will remember what happened on Sunday before they remember the Super Bowl, and that's not just due to the effects of alcohol on the memory.
In sum, kicking is good, sometimes great, always a promise of something unsettling coming, and not just because Jacksonville's Cam Little kicked a 70-yarder last month and hasn't been trusted beyond 47 in the regular season. It's because kicking and only kicking gives us moments of bet-busting joy like these; without it, football is just multiples of seven with compressed vertebrae.
