The kickers are too good
I long for the days when kickers sometimes missed. PLUS: The Chiefs's vibes are disastrously off, Giants-Cowboys justified the NFL's YEARS of feeding us slop, and more!
The kickers are getting too good.
On Saturday against Clemson, Georgia Tech nonchalantly ran a quarterback draw to set up a 55-yard field goal for Aidan Burr. The Yellow Jackets weren’t scrambling to push the ball downfield. They felt confident that their kicker, junior Aidan Birr, could drill a 50-plus-yard kick. And he did, the longest kick in Georgia Tech program history:
On Sunday, the Dallas Cowboys also ran a draw in the closing seconds of regulation against the Giants. Except they were 10 yards farther away from the goal line than Georgia Tech was, setting up the third-longest field goal in NFL history. (Fourth-longest if we count Cam Little’s preseason kick, WHICH I PERSONALLY DO.) The kicker was Brandon Aubrey, the burgeoning GOAT (the KID?), who also confidently drilled it with room to spare:
I mean, come on. The camera’s initial shot doesn’t even include the uprights! They had to zoom up to show whether this was going in or not! (It was, because it’s Brandon Aubrey.
Aubrey has now hit four 60-yard field goals in his career, which is as many as every kicker in the NFL in the entire 20th century. (Aubrey is 4-for-6; 20th century kickers were 4-for-61.) Kickers are currently hitting at the best rate in NFL history despite attempting 50-yard field goals at the highest rate in NFL history and sub-30 yard field goals at the lowest rate since the 1960s. (All real stats!) There have been more field goals made from 50-plus yards this year (29 on 35 attempts) than total field goals missed from all distances (18).
I’m sorry, but the kickers are too good. What happened to suspense? What happened to being nervous when my team lines up for a key kick? What happened to blaming all of my woes and sorrows in life on the 5’9 guy on a team of 300-pounders? It’s much less fun to yell “you only have one job!” when the person in question has completely mastered that job.
Perhaps you think I’m being cruel. The kicker has been mocked for so long, and now that he’s thriving, I want him to fail again. But think: In the not-so-distant future, when kickers are able to split the uprights from 95 yards away… what will become of the noble punter? We must nerf kickers ASAP to save special teams from its own success. Make them kick barefoot!
Is it Mahomesver?
Sunday featured a rematch of last season’s Super Bowl between the Eagles and Chiefs. This week’s game was closer, because the vast majority of football games are closer than last season’s Super Bowl, but the Chiefs still lost, 20-17. The pivotal play came when Travis Kelce bobbled a potential go-ahead fourth quarter touchdown pass into the arms of Eagles safety Andrew Mukuba.
Last year’s Chiefs were 15-2 with 12 one-score wins. This year, they are 0-2 with 2 one-score losses. That’s not regression to the mean; it’s the mean throwing Kansas City out of the ring and through the announcer’s table while the crowd goes wild.
Last year, the Chiefs made every play when it mattered. This year, their Hall of Fame quarterback’s passes are going through the hands of their Hall of Fame tight end and into the arms of waiting defenders.
As Jalen Hurts prepared to take his victory kneeldowns, Chiefs star Chris Jones tried to make fun of his passing stats, claiming he didn’t even have 100 yards. Not fully accurate: Hurts had 101. Hurts responded by saying “we won the fucking game.” Can confirm: Accurate.
I understand that it’s been a while since the Chiefs lost a close game, but man: You guys are three-time Super Bowl champions and five-time AFC Champions. What are you doing chirping about opposing passing stats? Have you no shame? Shouldn’t a certain number of championship rings inoculate you from Soreloseritis?
A lot can happen before the end of the season, but at 0-2, Kansas City faces an uphill battle to win its 10th straight AFC West championship. And let’s be honest: The vibes are off. And despite all the advanced analysis we have at our fingertips, football is more vibes based than we’d like to admit.
Rule 10, Section 4, Paragraph 2 Deep Rulebook Lore Moment of the Week
The Steelers made the mistake of sending out Bartleby the Return Man on Sunday. When the Seahawks kicked the ball to him, he said, “I would prefer not to return it.” He bravely stood aside, abdicating his duties as the ball bounced into the end zone, where the Seahawks jumped on it for a free touchdown.
Yes, those are the rules. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a ref sound more frustrated: ”The ball hit in the landing zone on the kickoff, somebody’s gotta cover it for the receiving team.” He wasn’t mad, just disappointed nobody else had read the rulebook.
Quirky Research lists 12 instances of kickoffs being recovered by the kicking team for a touchdown, but that includes six muffs, which feel fundamentally different from plays in which the receiving team simply forgets to pick up the ball. The most recent instance was in 2017, when the Bills ignored a Jets kickoff. Before that, the kicking team hadn’t scored on a kickoff since 1984.
Bartleby was Steelers rookie Kaleb Johnson, perhaps confused due to a small but tragically real difference between the NFL and college rulebooks. (His uniform didn’t change when he went from Iowa to Pittsburgh, so why would the rules?) NCAA rules state that “when a free kick untouched by Team B touches the ground on or behind Team B’s goal line, the ball becomes dead and belongs to Team B.” You’ll often see college players start jogging off the field once it becomes clear the ball is going to hit the ground in the end zone, just like Johnson did. In the pros, however, “A kickoff or safety kick into the end zone that remains inbounds is a live ball and must be returned or downed by the receiving team.” In case that wasn’t clear enough, the NFL rulebook goes on to add that “a player of the kicking team may touch, catch, or recover the ball if it lands or is touched by a receiving team player in the landing zone or in the end zone.”
Why such a trivial, arcane, and potentially hugely consequential difference between the two rules sets? Because f*** it, that’s why!
In my opinion, the idea that the kicking team can recover the kick on a kickoff predates football. If you watch any rugby match, you’ll see that the team kicking off after a score pretty regularly gets the ball back after kicking it deep. I think the NFL has the better rules here … even if they only come into play once every few decades.
The carousel begins spinning
Coach Firing Season has begun in college football, and both instances were pretty clear cut. Virginia Tech and UCLA are both 0-3, and were both blown out at home by schools from non-power conferences: VT got dropped 45-26 by Old Dominion, and UCLA lost 35-10 to New Mexico. Both teams were double-digit favorites, and both teams paid their opponents money to play the game: ODU got $400,000, while New Mexico got $1.2 million.
Virginia Tech really, really, really needs to stop scheduling Old Dominion. Since moving up to FBS in 2014, ODU is 35-45 against Conference USA competition, but 3-2 against the Hokies. Brent Pry’s first game as head coach was a loss against ODU… and so was his last. He successfully turned a team that lost by three points to Old Dominion and turned them into a team that lost by 19 points to Old Dominion. At least the first one was on the road—this one was in Blacksburg. How do you give up 45 points after Enter Sandman?
You know how sometimes a third-string QB gets put into an NFL game and it feels like he can barely handle a snap or complete a handoff, and you suddenly realize the impossibly high demands of being an NFL quarterback? UCLA is that third-string QB, a college football program that has spent two years stumbling through life, barely able to get out of its own way.
The Bruins have been in limbo since February 2024, when Chip Kelly left to become Ohio State’s offensive coordinator. The coaching cycle had already wrapped up, so basically every candidate was off the market, and UCLA hired internally, promoting running backs coach Deshaun Foster — a lifelong Bruin and former NFL running back — to run the program.
Foster’s hire hypothetically provided continuity. UCLA had been building up to the 2024 season, when it had nine seniors starting on defense, including All-American linebacker Carson Schwesinger among four eventual draft picks. Foster successfully kept the roster intact, but UCLA had a terrible offense and went 5-7.
Because Foster was a late hire in 2024, he didn’t have a chance to pick his assistants, so he cleaned house and brought in an entirely new coaching staff last December. Then in April, just as spring practice was wrapping up, UCLA landed 5-star transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava, and just about every returning QB on the roster transferred away. (The Bruins only had one QB taking snaps in the spring game.) So the new offensive staff spent its first offseason coaching players who wouldn’t even play at UCLA. Meanwhile, the defense lost its top 10 tacklers, and was going to be brutally bad no matter what in 2025.
The vagaries of the college football calendar created a ton of sliding door moments for UCLA, and it crashed into all of them. Now the Bruins will limp through three quarters of a season with no coach, no purpose, a new staff that’s already doomed, and a roster leaking players left and right.
I think they’ll beat Northwestern on Saturday.
Great news! You’ve been promoted to Virginia Tech’s new interim head coach after their 0-3 start. Your first press conference is tomorrow, and it’s a big one: Not only do you have to look sharp, you have to convince the fanbase that you care about their culture and history if you want to keep this job for good. What are you going to wear?!?!?!?!
Thankfully, Homefield Apparel has got you covered. They’ve got all sorts of Virginia Tech hoodies, embroidered crewnecks, pullovers, hats, and jackets to make you look like the finest interim coach the school has ever had.
I’m personally a fan of their FIGHTIN’ GOBBLERS line, which I wear every Thanksgiving and also every time I’m at a Virginia Tech game:
Revenge of the Slop
The NFL has always insisted that it knows what we want, and that what we want is more Giants-Cowboys. In 2015, I wrote a piece called The NFC East is garbage, and we can’t stop watching it, and I stand by both halves of that headline. Last year, the Thanksgiving afternoon game featured the 2-9 Giants and the 4-7 Cowboys, both of whom were playing backup quarterbacks in Drew Lock and Cooper Rush. Not only was this nuclear poopfest the most-watched game of the 2024 regular season, it had the fifth-most viewers of any NFL regular season game ever. We don’t just tolerate the slop; we yearn for it.
For whatever reason, the NFL buried Sunday’s Giants-Cowboys game in the crowded 1 p.m. slot against eight other games, the first time a Giants-Cowboys game had been played at 1 p.m. since 2005. Perhaps it was because the Giants have the worst record in the NFL since 2017. Perhaps it was because the Cowboys signaled their commitment to mediocrity by hiring Brian Schottenheimer as their head coach. Perhaps it was a legitimate moment of clarity at NFL HQ, an acknowledgment that even though this league has attained undisputed status as the king of American entertainment, its grip on our culture could slip if it keeps force-feeding fans with the worst the league has to offer.
And then the Giants and Cowboys played a classic: 37-34 Dallas, in overtime. 70 minutes of riveting football.
The fourth quarter featured five lead changes. It was the first game in NFL history with a game-tying kick with no time on the clock in regulation and a game-winning kick with no time on the clock in overtime. Russell Wilson threw for 450 yards in his 14th season in the league, just barely falling short of his career high of 452. This clip of Cam Skattebo battering his way to the goal line was maybe the sixth-best highlight of the game’s end.
Meanwhile, the Vikings-Falcons game that the NFL put in primetime instead nearly became the first Sunday Night Football game since 2002 with no touchdowns. (The Falcons got one at the end, but only because the Vikings let them in.)
The NFL is never going to make this mistake again. It’s going spotlight every Giants-Cowboys mid-off from here until infinity, and I have decided to see that as a blessing from our benevolent overlords. They know what’s best for us, and what’s best for us is Giants-Cowboys. When the NFL offers a subscription service allowing it to beam Giants-Cowboys directly into my brain, I will be first in line to get the chip implanted. Tie me to the trough and load up the smelly stuff!
15-yard penalty, eavesdropping
Time always comes for the middlemen.
In the past 15 years or so, former officials have become standard fixtures on football broadcasts, quickly parsing the intricacies of the sport’s 300-page rulebook for the masses. FOX started the trend when it hired former NFL officiating head Mike Pereira to assist with major NFL broadcasts in 2010. Now, even the CW has its very own rules expert on hand.
However, I suspect the twilight of the Rules Analyst is upon us. During ACC games this weekend, ESPN broadcasted the live conversations between the games’ referees and the conference’s replay command center as part of a pilot program that may expand to more games throughout the season. I noticed it for the first time during NC State-Wake Forest on Thursday, and then Georgia Tech-Clemson on Saturday.
Leagues have avoided allowing fans this level of transparency, presumably for fear of exposing their errors. But other sports have already been giving fans similar access to officiating decisions (cricket and rugby stand out), and it seems to universally increase trust in officiating. For me, it was cool to hear officials’ jargon and thought processes, and I was impressed by how confident they were in their calls.
Quite frankly, I think network rules experts eroded public faith in officiating. Just the idea of the job implies that refs need to be heavily scrutinized and held accountable. But those rules experts are also often retired refs with little media training. Sometimes it feels like they are hedging their analysis to avoid sounding critical of their peers. For both viewers and for leagues, it’s better to just let us hear what’s going on, straight from the ref’s mouth. Time always comes for the middlemen.
College Credits
Everybody’s favorite college football team is Georgia Tech. Its offensive strategy is “run headfirst into the line of scrimmage” and it works every time. The Yellow Jackets are going to make the College Football Playoff. I believe that in my soul.
West Virginia won the Backyard Brawl in overtime over Pitt. Here’s my video from the Brawl in 2023, probably my favorite video I made on my roadtrip:
The trick play of the week is this Purdue double pass that went so poorly that Purdue ended up scoring a touchdown. It’s one of the most college football plays in the history of college football:
Up until this point in his coaching career, Deion Sanders has had the luxury of slotting in his son at QB1. Now he’s got his first-ever open QB controversy, and he’s making a mess of it. After portaling in former Conference USA MVP Kaidon Salter and recruiting 5-star freshman Julian Lewis, Coach Prime has turned to last year’s backup, Ryan Staub, who didn’t look particularly impressive in a 36-20 loss to Houston
Villanova covered the 46.5-point spread against Penn State on this ridiculous, totally unnecessary touchdown catch to make the score 52-6 with no time remaining:
I like gambling. It’s fun and I generally make money doing it. I would never advise anybody to gamble, but I would also feel uncomfortable tsk-tsking anybody away from one of my favorite leisure activities. That said: Please, please, please do not bet on any 30-plus point spreads in FBS vs. FCS games. There’s pretty much no way to project how much one team decides to blow out the other … or how motivated the losing team is to make one perfect highlight against a team it could never beat.
Pro Tips
The Broncos lost to the Colts after an extremely rare LEVERAGE penalty wiped out Indianapolis’ missed game-winning field goal.
Leverage is the call for when a player climbs a teammate or opponent in an attempt to block a kick. It got called four times last year, but never in a situation this dramatic. (The previous most dramatic leverage call came on this game-winning extra point attempt in 2022, but the kick was good so it actually wasn’t that dramatic.) The call was pretty indisputable — you can see Denver linebacker Dondrea Tillman trying to climb over an Indianapolis lineman — and it was totally unnecessary since the kick wasn’t even close.
Mac Jones stepped in for the 49ers with Brock Purdy out and threw for 279 yards and three touchdowns, one of the best games of his career. The performance further proved that basically any quarterback — from CJ Beathard, to Jimmy Garoppolo, to Brock Purdy himself — can step in and look pretty good for the Niners. The Niners gave Brock Purdy $250 million even though just about any quarterback seems reasonably capable of leading the Niners to victories.
Remember how I said the Patriots have clearly established themselves as the best return team under the new kickoff rules? They had the first kickoff touchdown of the season Sunday! And it wasn’t even the same guy who returned a kickoff for a touchdown in preseason (that was TreVeyon Henderson, this was Antonio Gibson.)
Giants offensive lineman James Hudson set what is almost definitely an NFL record by committing four penalties on one drive: unsportsmanlike conduct, false start, unsportsmanlike conduct, then another false start:
There aren’t any good stats on this, but, like… it’s pretty rare to commit four penalties in an entire game, let alone on the same drive. Hudson committed 30 yards of penalties on a drive that ended at the 20-yard line, forcing the Giants to settle for a field goal in a game they lost in overtime.
NAIA Madonna beat D3 Olivet for their first win ever! Every game they'd played of their 45 had been a loss until that one!
Also, fun thing, I met Haynes King's uncle back in April. If you think he's unbothered by pain, you should know his sister was a college gymnast for 5 seasons.
I'm old enough to remember when a 50 yard FG was a big deal. Now you can't even get a job in the NFL if you aren't automatic from that range.