Strides in the foot game

There are books on the subject now, but back in 1969 coaching kickers was virgin territory. Marv Levy knows. He was there then and he's still there today.

``Back then, coaches said what they say now about the kicking game," recalled the 80-year-old general manager of the Buffalo Bills about his first days of NFL coaching, when he was then the rarest of breeds -- a special teams coach. ``They all said kicking was a third of the game but they didn't live it. It was just a bromide. But [then-Eagles coach] Jerry Williams knew it was important. Then, in 1971, George Allen hired me to go to the Redskins. That's when things began to change."

At the time there were only two full-time special teams coaches in the league, but their superiors began taking a more serious and enlightened view of the kicking game after 1972 for the only reason coaches do anything. They started getting beat by ignoring it.

``We blocked 15 kicks in 1972, allowed only 24 total yards on punt returns," Levy said. ``We won games because of the kicking game. In the Super Bowl that year we lost to Miami, 14-7, but we were down, 14-0, and blocked a field goal and made it 14-7. We just missed blocking another one by an inch. The importance of the kicking game expanded after that."

True enough, but in that same game a tiny, bald bow tie salesman named Garo Yepremian so botched trying to throw a football after his field goal attempt was blocked that he set back the perception of placekickers for decades. When Yepremian's pass attempt went backward when the ball fell out of his hand as he tried to throw, it was an image of athletic ineptitude that stuck with kickers like crazy glue between their fingers for years. All of them, in the mind of the public and many of their teammates, were tiny, balding men from some foreign land whose only connection to pro football was that occasionally they would come in and, as Detroit Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras once said mockingly, ``Keek a touchdown."

But the special teams success of Allen's Redskins could not be ignored, and more and more teams began to assign a coach to the job, although it was often a young, inexperienced assistant like a kid named Bill Belichick, who was named assistant special teams coach in Detroit in 1976. Or it was someone assigned extra duty after finishing coaching another position full time, often tight ends for some reason.

Even as young a coach as 43-year-old John Harbaugh, the highly regarded special teams coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, laughingly recalls how one got into that specialized end of the coaching fraternity 20 years ago.

``Here's how you got to be a special teams coach when I started," recalled Harbaugh, who first worked in that area at the University of Pittsburgh in 1987 and then at Morehead State in 1988. ``You're all at a meeting and the head coach says, `Who wants the punt team?' Everybody leans back, but you react too late. Things have changed a lot since then.

``Now most teams have a special teams coach and an assistant special teams coach. We all realize the importance of the kicking game today. Games are won and lost with it every Sunday. The kicking game is so important and the kickers today are so much more accurate because the approach is different. It's not something you do when you're not playing tackle or whatever anymore."

Back in the black-and-white televised days of pro football, when Lou ``The Toe" Groza, Paul Hornung, Bobby Layne, George Blanda, and Lou Michaels reigned supreme, kickers most often were position players asked to work overtime. It was not often a specialty then because who would waste a roster spot on a guy who only kicked for a living?

But today, kickers have reached if not an exalted position in the game, certainly a pivotal one. Over the last 20 years, according to several gambling websites that keep accurate records about margin of victory, 46.12 percent of all NFL games were decided by 7 points or fewer, and 23.59 percent were determined by 3 points or fewer.

Rick Gonsalves, who runs the Cape Ann Kicking Academy in Gloucester and has prepared special teams reports and done kicker evaluations for several NFL teams, as well as providing statistical analysis for many pro kickers, reports that since 1970, the year of the AFL-NFL merger, 7,884 games were played in professional football. During that 36-year period, ``The number of games won by field goals is 2,225 or 28 percent," Gonsalves reports. ``The number of games won by field goals with one minute or less left was 375, five seconds or less 217, and with no time left 94. The number of games lost by missed field goals for those years was 144."

In other words, kickers have a lot to say not only about who cashes betting slips in Las Vegas but who goes to the Super Bowl.

Bill Parcells and Jerry Jones learned that the hard way a year ago when their Cowboys finished 9-7 and out of the playoffs because of serious kicking flaws. Dallas went through three kickers and played in nine games decided by 4 points or fewer. They lost three of them, which was the difference between being 12-4 with home-field advantage in the postseason, and watching other teams fight it out for a trip to the Super Bowl.

Realizing they had to rectify that, the Cowboys spent far more than they ever had to ensure that situation would not be repeated, signing the most accurate kicker in NFL history, Mike Vanderjagt, to a multimillion dollar deal. Although it was a missed Vanderjagt field goal that knocked his Colts out of the playoffs on their home field last season, his accuracy is verifiable and not unusual. Today, it is the norm.

Twenty years ago, the average NFL kicker made 67.3 percent of his kicks. In 1977, the average was 58.3 percent. Last year it was 80.9 percent, having held at around 80 percent the past five seasons. So at a time when games are being decided by closer margins, kickers are not only not cracking under that pressure, they're producing better than ever.

``Look at the elite kickers from the '60s, '70s, and even the '80s," says the Bills' Bobby April, who is widely recognized as the NFL's premier special teams coach. ``Look at their field goal percentage. It's not very good. They wouldn't stay with a team now."

Jan Stenerud is a case in point. Stenerud is the only pure kicker in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, an indictment more of the way kickers have been thought of than their true importance. Yet he converted only 373 of his 558 field goal attempts in a 19-year career, an accuracy rate of 66.8 percent. He did have a season in which he hit 91 percent, but there have been four kickers since 1991 who hit 100 percent, the last being Vanderjagt, who went 37 of 37 in 2003.

What of The Toe? Well, judging by today's standards, the insteps have it all over him. Groza toed 234 field goals successfully out of 405 attempts, an accuracy rate of 57.7 percent. These days, that would get him cut by August.

And remember quarterback/kicker Blanda, who in a five-game period in 1970 provided the Raiders with four wins and a tie with last-second touchdown passes or field goals when he was 43? He is in the Hall, but not for his kicking we hope. His career percentage was only 52.3 (335 of 641). See you at the bus station with those kind of numbers.

To put this all in perspective, the highest career field goal percentage for kickers with 100 field goals or more belongs to Vanderjagt, who has an 87.5 percent accuracy rate. The top five all-time are all active, with Phil Dawson at 83.85, Matt Stover at 83.15, Jeff Wilkins at 82.03, and Olindo Mare at 82.02. New England's favorite kicker, Adam Vinatieri, now with the Colts, has delivered at an 81.93 conversion rate, a 15.1 percent improvement over the only kicker in the Hall of Fame.

``These guys train differently today," April explained. ``Most of them were athletes, not just kickers. They've been to kicking camp since they were kids. They're in the weight room. They're stretching to maintain flexibility all the time. The fields they kick on are better. Most of it is synthetic turf, and even the grass fields are in good shape.

``Late in the season today is not what Lou Groza was kicking on in the '50s and '60s. Lou's percentage is not that great, but he was playing tackle and what did Cleveland Stadium look like back then in November and December?"

Training and mid week preparation certainly was different. Some 25 years ago you could walk into the locker room of the Oakland Raiders during practice and shoot the breeze or play cards with the kicker and punter. Today, not only would you be shot just for thinking about such a thing, so would the kickers.

``Today those guys work with the holder and snapper throughout practice," April said. ``In a lot of places they have their own practice field to work on. When I first got to Pittsburgh, Gary Anderson [one of the all-time best kickers] told me [Hall of Fame center] Mike Webster used to snap for him. He'd snap about three times at the end of practice and tell Gary, ``I'm done . . . and so are you."

Sometimes the holder was the quarterback, a division of labor that often didn't work to the kicker's advantage. April recalled Norm Johnson telling him how when he kicked for Seattle, starting quarterback Jim Zorn used to be an often-distracted holder.

``Norm said if a receiver dropped a pass so they had to kick it, Zorn would be cursing the receiver as the ball was coming back to him from center for the kick," April said. ``I imagine that's a little distracting."

Standards today are so high for kickers and the pressure so withering there is little room for error and no acceptance of failure for long. When once converting 60 percent was exemplary, today you had best be close to 80 percent.

``When I started, anything above 75 percent was good," said Mare, who is entering his 10th year as the Dolphins kicker. ``Now guys are better. If I can gain a yard by working on sprints and a yard by doing squats, if I can do two or three things other guys aren't doing, it's more yards [per kick]. I think we're all trying hard to be perfect with what we do."

Certainly Harbaugh understands the quest. He oversees one of the game's all-time most accurate kickers, David Akers, and one day last week was coming out of an hour long meeting with him. Not a meeting with his special team units . . . this was a regular session only with his kicker.

``You can be dominant with your return and coverage teams, but if the placekicker doesn't come through none of that matters," said Harbaugh. ``You need such technical competence in addition to flexibility and obviously leg strength. It's like hitting a driver. A lot of people can hit it on the range, but who can take it out of the bag and hit it down the middle when everyone is watching?

``You need a strong psychological makeup. Joe Montana used to say the higher the pressure the more he relied on fundamentals. That's all I remind David. I don't coach him. He knows more about kicking than I do. Most of us don't know kicking. We know our kicker."

That day Harbaugh and Akers sat in a room watching slow-motion replays of Akers's kicks, studying his plant foot, his takeoff -- everything. They used a stopwatch to see how quickly the ball was getting to the holder and how quickly Akers was getting to the ball. Every portion of the kick was broken down and analyzed the way Tiger Woods looks at his swing. Around the NFL such meetings were taking place from Foxborough to San Diego. Lou Groza didn't spend much time in such meetings, if they even existed. This is a new day for kickers.

Yet for all the pressure of the job and the time spent working on proper alignment of the plant foot, honing the timing with the holder and snapper, or fine-tuning the kicking stroke to be sure he's not falling off the ball or too quick with his hips, the kicker's life is still a bit different than the nose tackle's. And a bit more attractive when things are going well.

``If anybody's got a good life, it's a kicker," Harbaugh said. ``They're in the hot tub. They're getting a steam. They have a masseuse to keep them loose. It's a good deal except when 75,000 people are screaming at you."

That's when all the preparation pays off, and it's never paid a higher dividend than it does today, a player for whom 80 percent accuracy is not exceptional anymore. It's all but required.

``Most players respect kickers today," Harbaugh said. ``They know how important the job is, but they don't know how difficult it is. It's a different sport, really. If you make a mistake in football you grit your teeth and bow up. You do that in kicking and the next ball is in the woods. You've got to be strong physically and mentally to do that job."

Yet while a kicker will decide so many games, he can't let that pressure wear him down. It is the kind of balancing act trapeze artists and high-wire walkers have to get used to, or else. It's a grind after 1,000 or so kicks a year.

``You can't be anal and be a kicker," April said. ``You've got to be able to weather your mistakes and not repeat them because the only thing that disrupts a kicker is the mental barriers. Once your body has the flexibility, strength, and motor memory, distractions are the only thing that can hurt you. Thinking is what can make things go wrong for a kicker, and that's difficult to avoid.

``How important is the kicker? Well, if points are important, how important is your leading scorer? He's damn sure important."

Levy knows that better than most. He knew it from the start, because he was there at the start, but the lesson was harshly driven home for him Jan. 27, 1991 when Scott Norwood's 47-yard field goal attempt went wide by a coat of paint and the Bills team he coached lost Super Bowl XXV, 20-19, to the Giants. What was the value of a kicker that day?

``When you think of the pressure these guys are under, and how often they convert big kicks, it's a disgrace there's only one pure kicker in the Hall of Fame," Harbaugh said. ``They say, `He's only a kicker.' Well, it's part of the game and has become one of the most important parts of the game. Games are won and lost with it every week. They made the uprights tighter, they moved the goalpost back, and they're more accurate than ever. Kickers are getting better and better."

And their importance, as the numbers bear out, is getting bigger and bigger.