Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Grown quarterbacks crawling around? Football players watching soccer players decide games? Field goals must go.
Nov 28, 2005 | With no rooting interest in the New York Giants-Seattle Seahawks game Sunday, I was still dispirited by the Seahawks' victory. Annoyed, irritated. I actually stopped eating leftover turkey for a few seconds, I was so upset.
Football players played football for almost five quarters, but the game was won -- and lost -- by placekickers, men whose main job is staying awake on the sidelines all afternoon without reading magazines.
Death to placekicking.
Down 21-13 on the road, the Giants outplayed the Seahawks down the stretch, tying the game with an acrobatic touchdown catch by Amani Toomer and then a two-point conversion pass from Eli Manning to Jeremy Shockey.
New York had a chance to win in regulation, but kicker Jay Feely pushed a 40-yard field goal attempt wide left as regulation time expired. Then he was short on a 54-yarder in overtime, a very long kick, but had yet another chance to win, a 45-yarder. He was short on that too.
The Seahawks, having been saved from extinction twice, finally cashed in, winning on a 36-yard field goal by Josh Brown.
The look on Manning's face after Feely's third miss, his second of an attempt well within his range, said it all.
The look said, "I bust my ass, play my best game as a pro, hit 29 of 53 for 344 yards and two touchdowns, Amani Toomer and Plaxico Burress and Jeremy Shockey and Tiki Barber play like hell to overcome 473 false-start penalties, our defense keeps the best offense in the conference under control, and we can't win because Sparky the Soccer Refugee can't kick the stupid ball straight?
"That King Kaufman was right! Placekicking drags down our great sport. Football games should be decided by football players making football plays -- and yes, I know the word 'foot' is in football. The word "head" is in head cheese, but they don't make it out of heads."
OK, I might be projecting a little, but the look was definitely not saying, "It sure is great how a missed field goal can add so much excitement to an NFL game."
In the aftermath of one of Feely's misses, a TV camera caught defensive end Michael Strahan on the sideline saying, "How the hell do you miss that!?"
Feely was a mensch about the whole thing, apologizing to the team in the locker room and then facing the media. "People are going to say it's a team game and they're going to say the right things," he said about his teammates. "But the fact of the matter is that you've got to come through when you have one opportunity -- much less two good opportunities."
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