The Riddle Of The Kicker

It was a Tuesday in the middle of the 1977 season, and the Philadelphia Eagles needed a kicker. Player personnel assistant Carl Peterson thought he had found a winner in Ove Johansson, so he fetched coach Dick Vermeil to come watch the Swede try out. Kick after soccer-style kick, the ball boomed off Johansson's right foot, high and deep, 80 yards in the air. "Sign him right now," Vermeil said.

A few days later, on the plane ride to St. Louis for a game against the Cardinals, Johansson walked up to Peterson's seat and told him he didn't see much confidence on the team. Johansson said the Eagles needed some training in the power of positive thinking. Peterson told Johansson to sit down.

That was the first indication Peterson had that signing Johansson, who had kicked for Abilene (Texas) Christian, may have been a mistake. The second indication came during warmups before that Sunday's game, as Peterson watched Johansson kick into the practice net on the sideline. Johansson's first attempt missed the net, hooked terribly and hit a fan in the first row smack in the face. Peterson started to feel woozy.

Then, on the game's opening kickoff, Johansson's boot fluttered only 44 yards. Vermeil shot a dirty look at Peterson. Ten minutes into a scoreless game, Johansson tried his first field goal, from 43 yards, and pulled it so far left that it landed in the corner of the end zone. Now Peterson felt like throwing up.

But wait. Late in the second quarter, after Philly had scored a touchdown, Johansson trotted out for the extra point—and it was blocked! The Eagles lost 21-16, and as Vermeil walked off the field, he went straight for Peterson. "Fire that s.o.b.!" Vermeil said. "I don't even want him on the charter home!"

Pro football—what a science! The NFL's far-reaching scouting network can root out a semipro player in Massachusetts, and the best coaches in the world can turn a Notre Dame quarterback with an ordinary arm into a four-time Super Bowl champion, but nobody can solve the riddle of the placekicker. Kicking remains the most imperfect, maddening and costly variable in the game. Yet with a quarter of the 896 games played in the last four seasons having been decided by three points or fewer, field goals have never been more important.

Last year NFL kickers made good on 73.5% of their field goal tries, the fifth year in a row that kickers converted at least seven of every 10 attempts. That's terrific, when you consider the weather some guys kick in, all the 50-yard-plus attempts and the pressure that goes with the job.

But on any Sunday, particularly late in the game, these guys can be dangerous. On each of two weekends last season, there were four games in which kickers failed to make field goals that would have won a game or sent it into overtime.

On Sept. 15 the New York Jets, the New York Giants, the San Diego Chargers and the San Francisco 49ers all came up short when their placekickers came up empty. But Nov. 3 was especially horrific: The Cleveland Browns' Matt Stover missed a field goal from 47 yards and had a 34-yarder blocked, both in the final two minutes of a 23-21 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals; the Green Bay Packers' Chris Jacke blew a 42-yarder in overtime in a 19-16 loss to the Jets; San Francisco's Mike Cofer missed from 33, 32, 32 and 47 yards in a 17-14 loss to the Atlanta Falcons; and the Houston Oilers' Ian Howfield pulled a 33-yarder to the left with four seconds to play in Washington, and the Redskins won 16-13 in overtime. Howfield was fired the next day.

So why is it that even though every year a few kickers alter the course of their teams' seasons, clubs still don't place more emphasis on scouting, drafting and coaching kickers? Every team has at least one special teams coach, but only one team, the Dallas Cowboys, has a kicking coach—someone who works exclusively with the kickers and their strange and fragile psyches.