Points East
GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Hopefully I'll be a lot better at making my point than Jeff Chandler was at making his on Saturday. Let’s give place-
kickers the bootMaybe it's time to take the foot out of football. The only negative I can think of giving kickers the boot is that Jason Elam, one of the nicest guys in sports, would have to find a new job.
If the Southeastern Conference is the best football league in the free world, why can't anybody kick an extra point?
This is one of the questions denizens of The Swamp pondered Saturday night after Chandler missed his for Florida and Chris Kemp missed his for Alabama in one of the most bizarre overtime outcomes of recent memory.
Kemp got a reprieve because Florida's Bennie Alexander was offsides. He barely made his re-try, and the Gators' 30-game home winning streak became history and the Tide went home with a huge 40-39 upset.
While this totally muddles not only the SEC title picture, but the national scene, too, one thing is certain: Mandarin High in Jacksonville, the alma mater of both Chandler and Kemp, is now officially the Cradle of Lousy Kickers.
Or maybe that title should go to Florida - last year the Gators lost to Tennessee when Collins Cooper missed a chip shot in OT.
OK, it's easy to kick a kicker when he's down, but it can be so much fun, and here's why: For every Elam who could probably make the team at another position, there are 25 dorky kickers who aren't really football players - they are just guys who can kick footballs.
Who among us hasn't begrudged a kicker being on the team? OK, we wouldn't want to be in his spot when he's sweating mortar shells at the 47, the scoreboard says 27-27 and the clock says 0:03. Maybe the more adventurous among us would like that situation ... but really, who do you know who dreams of kicking the game-winner rather than throwing, catching or running it? Maybe ESPN's "The Rick," but that's about it.
Most the time, kickers are baggage, just slightly more useful than that guy standing next to the coach, holding the clipboard and wearing the baseball cap. Then again, the backup quarterback is one blindside tackle from becoming the most important player on the field.
The kicker? He gets paid a really good salary to check out the cheerleaders up close, stretch a lot and put toe to leather five or six times a game. The pro kickers are so bored they've taken to complaining about the fact that they have to kick different balls than the ones that are used for the rest of the game.
BACK to Saturday, and how the game was decided by futility at 20 yards. There were 85,721 people at The Swamp, the largest crowd ever for a Florida home game. I'm being conservative in guessing that a good 10 percent, or 8,572 could make a point-after-touchdown.
So let's change the rules and make this thing interactive. From now on, whenever it's time to kick, a ticket stub number should be announced, and that lucky fan becomes part of the action. Of course, there must be a check with the NCAA compliance gurus to make sure the guest booter never had a term paper written for him or her.
Maybe you need more evidence that kicking has no place in football. If so, turn on your TV, and surf a few minutes until you find that really bad Tony Danza movie, the one where he's a garbage man who ends up becoming an NFL kicker.
Convinced?
Dave Reardon, who covered sports in Hawaii
from 1977 to 1998, is a sportswriter at the
Gainesville Sun. E-mail reardod@gvillesun.com