King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Orange Bowl gives Death to Placekicking campaign a shot in the leg. Plus: USC-Texas predictions.
Read more: Texas, Sports, Football, College Football, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
Jan. 4, 2006 | Tuned in to a football game Tuesday night and a soccer match broke out. Except the goalie was invisible and 10 feet in the air. Kicks were sailing wide left and wide right, and if there were some other direction for them to sail wide, they'd have done that too.
It was the best free advertising the American Society for the Abolishment of Placekicking could have hoped for, according to the ASAP's handsome and charming founder.
In the end, Penn State's kicker, Kevin Kelly, booted a chip shot through from 29 yards, making him the hero even though he'd previously missed 847 makable field goals. The Nittany Lions beat Florida State, the field goal missingest team in football history, 26-23 in triple overtime.
Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden have figured out a way to win 713 games between them, but they can't find a guy who can punch the pigskin between the yellow sticks in the big game.
Kelly actually only missed two field goals, from 29 and 38 yards, both of which would have been game winners. His opposite number, Gary Cismesia of Florida State, missed an extra point in the second quarter and game-winning field-goal attempts of 44 and 38 yards in overtime.
It turned out there were still about four hours of football left to play when Cismesia sent that PAT wide, and who knows how the rest of the game might have played out had he made it for 14-7 instead of missing it for 13-7.
But mathematically, at least, if he makes that innocuous kick, something he'd done on every opportunity all year, then FSU wins in regulation. And really I can't see anything Penn State would have done different strategically if Florida State had had that extra point from the second quarter on.
All of this is too bad, as all things placekick always are, because the missed-kick fest overshadowed what was a pretty good football game, especially if, as ABC announcer Mike Tirico put it, "you like punts."
There were 20 of those, exactly twice the average in the previous 26 bowl games this year, and five more than the previous bowl-season high of 15 punts in the Champs Sports, Alamo, Holiday and Houston bowls.
But I'm being a punk. It really was a good game, the punts the result of punishing defenses, not bad offenses, and the hitting and intensity levels both as good as it gets. I don't know that the world needs to avoid tie football games as much as it needs to avoid five-hour football games, but there's no denying that college football's overtime is a white-knuckle ride.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that the game can be turned over to kickers. If we can't eradicate placekicking -- just as we can't eradicate poverty, war and injustice, which are almost as bad -- can we at least get rid of it in overtime? Teams start every possession in field-goal range. They can just kick on the first play if they want. It's bogus.