NFL Should Kick Around Ways to Limit Field Goals

The NFL has a few big problems other than how to keep Buffalo out of its showcase game, the Super Bowl, for at least the next few years. Lord knows, that’s big enough. One year, Thurman Thomas forgets his helmet, the next he forgets the football. For Buffalo, the Super Bowl is a soup kitchen.

But the major threat to the professional football game, it seems to me, is not Super Bowl personnel or even salary cap. It’s how to get the foot out of football.

The field goal has threatened to take over the game, turn it into soccer.

Even the commissioner addressed the problem in Atlanta. It has cheapened the game.

It is almost like letting the bunt equal a home run in baseball. It is rewarded way out of proportion to its degree of difficulty.

Look at it this way: A team recruits a whole lockerful of the resident giants of the planet--powerful, fast, resourceful, athletic young men. It gives them a football and points them toward a goal line defended by another passel of powerful, fast, resourceful young giants.

They lock in combat, painstakingly gain yards. They pass, block, run. If they’re lucky, they finally cross a goal line at a major cost in nosebleeds, concussions, hamstrings, pinched nerves and limp-offs. They get six points.

Meanwhile, if they reach a stalemate, some 155-pound ex-tie salesman or soccer player, without shoulder pads or game shoes, flicks a windbreaker off his narrow chest, runs out, sweeps his foot--and puts three points on the board. His nose isn’t bleeding, his ears aren’t ringing, he has all his teeth and ears, he’ll never have a limp--but he might leave the game as the leading scorer in the history of his franchise.

Alex Karras, the great Detroit tackle, once sneeringly described the breed when he noted that he and his teammates played 58 minutes of head-knocking, gut-busting football whereupon a “skinny little guy who came to this country on a banana boat runs out there and wins the game and gets carried off screaming, ‘I keek a touchdown! I keek a touchdown!’ ”

The field goal was an integral--and deserving--part of the game in the days when the dropkick was in vogue. But when they perfected the hold and the placekick, it became a cheaper and cheaper way to score.

Perhaps you noted in this year’s Super Bowl, played indoors minus any vagrant wind currents for or against, a 53-yard field goal was thrown into the mix. Guys were being carried off the field in groups, but of the 19 points scored in the first half, 12 were bloodless placekicks. There were four touchdowns and five field goals scored in the entire game.

Fifty-yard field goals are becoming commonplace. There is little doubt that as the state of the art advances, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be kicking them 70 yards or more.

It has long been the notion in this corner that no playoff or Super Bowl game should be decided by an overtime field goal. It puts the premium on the coin toss. Whoever gets the ball in OT has merely to advance it a first down or so and then kick it through the uprights for the victory. You win the coin flip, eight chances out of 10 you win the overtime game.

Remember, it was not too long ago the goal posts were on the goal line in pro football. They moved them back because--guess why?--field goals were too easy!

They still are. There were 671 field goals in 1993, a 20% increase over the 561 in ’92. Touchdowns decreased from 958 in 1992 to 906 in ’93.

What to do about it? Well, Commissioner Paul Tagliabue has his competition committee working on it.

The principal step would be to reinstitute the two-point conversion, making a touchdown worth a potential eight points and increasing the discrepancy between it and the field goal.

That should probably pass with ease at the next league meeting in Orlando.

Other solutions are less foregone. One school of thought holds that the reward should be greater the longer the distance of the field goal. For instance, make the field goal inside the opponents’ 20-yard-line count only one point, the field goal between the 20 and 40 count two points and anything over 40 yards count the obligatory three.

But the other school of thought holds that this is the opposite of what you really want to do. They would make the long field goal count only one point, the medium two points and the close-in three points. Their notion is that a team should be rewarded for moving the ball close.

But, you ask, isn’t this tampering with the rules? Hey! Tampering with football rules is as American as turkey. Recall it wasn’t too long ago an incomplete pass in the end zone was a touchback and meant the ball went over to the other team on its 20-yard line and two incomplete passes in a row resulted in a five-yard penalty. They didn’t want the game to resemble what they called “aerial circuses” in those days, i.e., any game in which one team might throw as many as 10 passes.

No one’s going to want to watch a game between dueling kickers who might spend the night making field goals from their own 20. You may have seen the hamburger commercial in which kickers split the uprights from the roof of the stadium, off a passing blimp or off two statues and a flagpole. Given the advancement of the craft, it’s not so fanciful as it used to be.

Devaluing the field goal has to be a priority. Whether you do it by inflating the touchdown or other means is moot. You have to find a way to put guys nicknamed, “Galloping Ghost,” back into deciding games, not guys nicknamed, “The Toe,” who never touch the football with anything but their foot.

Maybe we should take a cue from that commercial and have it count only if they kick it from the top of the Goodyear dirigible.

Even then, they’ll probably start making two out of three.