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The men on the field are, however abstractly, risking their lives for the W.
Play to play, week to week, season to season everyone involved talks like all that matters is the size of the number on the W column come January.
Yet introduce a millionaire to a gamble that sets their nuts on the table, they find a way to talk about line assignments, route timing, snap counts, without almost EVER the "this is my guy, leading my guys, and we run THIS play when we need THESE yards"
It's one of the most cowardly displays in professional sports IMO, and that's with all due respect to these kickers who've worked HARD to reduce field goal/extra point boots from a goofy anecdote to one of the most intensely specialized jobs out there.
Show me a guy who can kick an oblong ball long-snapped from one big man's wide hands to one small man's tiny hands before being placed into a comically shaped piece of molded plastic at about the exact instant said guy forces said ball to interpret his own dumb foot as both rocket fool and guidance system and I say, "lemme see him put it in that target almost 80 yards down field!"
Unless I ever have the opportunity to see another guy catch said ball, look past 5-10 impossibly huge dudes towards 3-5 friends trying to trick 3-6 adversaries into losing track of them for a second or less so that guy 1 can look real cool - or alternatively, real bad should the latter guys embarrass his friends - in which case that guy with the cannon for a boot and the coach who loves him are both such downers, in no small part because even seeing that 4th and 5 failure on an offensive play (and FROM THAT DISTANCE especially) is inherently far more dramatic than some professional leg trying to downplay the impressiveness of a football field's dimensions.
If I ran football, I'd force a lockout if NFL teams were allowed to attempt field goals beyond 50 yards of the post. Or they could, but if they miss, the opponent gets to attempt a two point conversion sight unseen. Blah! It's great that kickers have become good enough to inspire that level of faith, except that it's boring and stupid and I can only appreciate it because I definitively can't do it nor fathom how it's done; still, I'm barely even a football fan anymore, I DID play lead option blocker and a myriad of speed/pursuit scheme positions when I did play, and I DO believe an increased passion for the value of 3 points can lessen head and neck injuries in football.
I lost the plot here, came back to acknowledge that. Bottom line: it's a cool skill them kicker boys have honed the past 10 years or so, but it's become such a ritualistic part of the sport (from the line changes to the "icing" timeout to the ever increasing certainty that it'll split the uprights) that the obvious skill involved feels trivial, and thus unimpressive, and thus anti-football. That digression to say: I'll always have love for a specialty player taking 10-ish snaps per game. And this post has clearly gotten all unnecessarily flowery.
But that took some real powerful, pungent, plentiful heapings of chicken AND dog shit to choose a field goal over whatever might've happened with the ball in Russ' hands. Ain't Russ calling plays from the core of the bong in large part because he felt Pete never changed the water or even cleaned the stem? If Russ is gonna lose in his first game as a Bronco, in his first game back in Seattle, under the floodlights of both whatever the 12th Man calls their stadium and the spotlight of Monday Night Football, anybody with fun in their veins knows you put the ball in his hands when it looks, feels and sounds most interesting to do so.
Let Russ Cook!
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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