Kickstart My Heart (1974)

Are NFL kickers too good for the game?

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I.

His name is Czeslaw Boleslaw Marcol, though after his family leaves Poland and comes to America in the wake of his father’s suicide, he refers to himself as Chester. He grows up in rural Michigan. He works on farms with his mother’s relatives, creeping through the muck to harvest cucumbers and lettuce. He is miserable in America, until one day at school, he rockets a penalty kick during an indoor soccer game, so fierce that it bounces back and bloodies his teacher’s nose.

The next day, that teacher takes Chester Marcol out to a football field. The teacher points to the goalposts, and Marcol complies, kicking a field goal from 30 yards, then 40, then 50, then 55. He’s a good athlete, and he picks up the sport quickly. He kicks at tiny NAIA Hillsdale College, where makes a 62-yard field goal. He becomes a four-time All-American, and then gets discovered by the Green Bay Packers, who draft him in the second round.

By 1974, Chester Marcol is the best kicker in football. There are fan clubs devoted to him. He makes the Pro Bowl, and makes one of the two longest kicks of that season: 52 yards. In all, he makes 25 of 39 field goals, or 64.1 percent, and he is 1-for-5 from beyond 50 yards.

This level of success makes him a hero in Green Bay. Today, 50 years later, those numbers would get him summarily fired.

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II.

Something very peculiar is happening so far this NFL season, even if we don’t know what it means yet: During Week 2, teams kicked 73 field goals, an all-time record. Through the season’s first two weeks, there have been more field goals than touchdowns for the first time in NFL history; 17 teams, or more than half the league, have kickers who have already made at least one field goal over 50 yards. The accuracy rate of field goals over 50 yards is just short of 90 percent.

During a Sunday night football game against the Chicago Bears, Houston Texans kicker Ka’imi Fairbairn made four field goals, three of them from more than 50 yards; that included a 59-yarder. And it is worth noting here that while Fairbairn has always been a pretty good kicker, he has never made a Pro Bowl.

All of this has been building for decades now, but this season, the quantum leap has become more apparent than ever. And I think it’s happening in part because pro football itself seems to have reached a strange and surprising crossroads: A league increasingly defined by the quarterback has suddenly ground to a halt over the course of its first two weeks. Passing numbers are down. Scoring is down. This has led to a number of seat-of-the-pants theories, so allow me to share mine. It goes like this:

Professional football will always agitate toward conservatism.

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III.

I think that this fundamental truth has been obscured a little by the game’s recent evolution, all these coaches willing to take chances and throw downfield and go for it on 4th down. It felt, over the course of the past decade, as if the college game had spread itself out in order to maximize the skills of its quarterbacks, and then the NFL followed suit.

But in a lot of ways, those coaches are bucking against football’s establishmentarian soul. By nature of its physicality—perhaps even by nature of it being a fundamentally American sport—the NFL will always attempt to correct itself (whether that correction is right or wrong). And I think that’s what’s happening now.

The oldest cliche in football is that the offense takes what the defense gives them. And so if the defense is dropping two safeties deep and orienting itself toward the pass, you’re going to run the ball. By the same token, if the points are there in a close game with an increasingly reliable kicking game, you’re going to take the points. Right now, field-goal kickers have become so utterly professionalized—and so far removed from the idea of a Pro Bowl kicker just showing up in a school gym one day—that there’s very little reason not to take the points.

Chester Marcol, that kicker for the Green Bay Packers, made $18,000 his rookie year and $21,000 in his second year; Ka’imi Fairbairn, by comparison, will make $5.3 million this season. That’s a hell of a lot of reasons to take the points.

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IV.

Perhaps you might argue that any kicker making over five million dollars a year should be able to kick a 50-yard field goal nine out of ten times. But the problem is that when the kicking gets to be too good, it also threatens to alter the fragile alchemy of the game itself. It’s the same thing that happened with defenses in the 1970s, when the NFL had to alter the rules to open things up for the quarterback revolution of the 1980s.

I’ve written about this idea before, but it bears repeating: The most interesting thing about football is the way that push-and-pull between progressivism and conservatism tends to define it (we could get into how the push and pull also defines America, but frankly, I don’t feel like writing any more about politics right now). The game is always going to push forward as society pushes forward, but it also will always be at war with itself.

I don’t know if we’re at one of those 1970s-era inflection points again, but it’s worth monitoring. Football needs to be progressive enough to make it an interesting entertainment product without shedding its reactionary soul, because this is an equally important part of its essence. It is the trickiest of all dances, in that it needs to keep moving forward without ever sacrificing what’s in its heart.

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