Here’s the latest installment of Thursday Morning Kicker on the New York Times’s NFL blog, The Fifth Down:

An enduring truism about the N.F.L. is that the guys who kick the ball are as disposable as a Pampers and as recyclable as today’s newspaper (the printed one). This season we have the perfect example. Just follow the bouncing punter:

Aug. 30: The Redskins cut veteran Derrick Frost and keep rookie draft pick Durant Brooks.

Sept. 1: The Packers sign Frost and cut Jon Ryan.

Sept. 9: The Seahawks sign Ryan and cut Ryan Plackemeier.

Oct. 14: The Redskins sign Plackemeier and (a few days later) cut Brooks.

And so the circle of the N.F.L. punting life is complete.

Read more. . .

The New York Times’s NFL blog, The Fifth Down, excerpts the first chapter of A Few Seconds of Panic, in which I compare myself to George Plimpton and find an NFL team willing to let me in:

Lord knows I’m no Plimpton. He was the tall, Mayflower-descended son of the founder of a white-shoe law firm. I’m the short, first-generation son of a Greek ship captain. By virtue certainly of the privileges he enjoyed but more of the personality that allowed him to capitalize on them, Plimpton was a presence. “He looked for ways in which he could make himself a ridiculous figure, and not only on the football field, but in all walks of life,” [the writer Peter] Matthiessen once said. “That made him a great storyteller.”

Still, I doubt that if Plimpton materialized as a young writer today he could pull off what he did in the late 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Those were times when celebrity sportswriters like Plimpton and Dick Schaap could forge deep, personal bonds with a Muhammad Ali or a Joe Namath and enjoy unguarded conversation at the same gatherings. Athletes today are weary of the media invasion, schooled to handle it with bromides and banalities, and generally uncurious about its practices and provenances. Breaching the levee that separates Reporter and Jock is more difficult now.

Plimpton began Paper Lion with a declaration: “I decided finally to pack the football.” Those seven words quickly established the author’s Everymanhood. The message was that the workings of pro football are such a mystery that training camp very well might be BYOB, bring your own ball. “The Detroit Lions officials had not sent me the sort of list one remembered from boys’ camp—that one should bring a pillow case, a mattress cover, a flashlight, a laundry bag, etc.”

Forty-plus years later, such naïveté isn’t plausible. We are routinely escorted inside the locker stalls and medicine cabinets, the Armani-stuffed closets and Bose-loaded Hummers of today’s professional athletes. We are fed an endless cycle of sports news and blather, in print, on television, on talk radio, on the Internet. Every fan is a columnist, every columnist an expert, every expert a media star. In NFL equipment rooms, six-packs of official game balls are stacked from floor to ceiling like cordwood. I pay $74.99 for one at retail. I won’t pack it.

Read more. . .

I had a piece in the sports section of Sunday’s New York Times about how older kickers are doing especially well this season:

NFL kickers are having their best season. And the oldest among them have been the best of all.

Defying time and logic, kickers 35 and older have converted 90 percent of their field-goal attempts — 6 percentage points better than their younger counterparts. That is a statistically significant margin, considering that in the N.F.L., every kick can be the difference between one more game and forced retirement.

Some of the aging kickers have been perfect or close to it. The Giants’ John Carney — the oldest player in the N.F.L. at 44 — has made 18 of 19 field-goal attempts, and his miss was a block. Carolina’s John Kasay, who has spent 18 of his 39 years in the league, is 16 for 16. Detroit’s Jason Hanson, 38 and in his 17th season, is 10 for 10, including a league-leading five field goals of 50 yards or longer.

Read more. . .

My friend the NFL placekicker is having his greatest season ever–again. I examine why in this week’s Sports Illustrated:

In 1983 two UNLV professors explored a pressing academic subject: the NFL placekicker. The kicker, they reported in the journal Qualitative Sociology, was a classic example of German sociologist Georg Simmel’s “stranger,” an outsider central to a group. Tiny, foreign and eccentric, the kicker wasn’t “properly socialized”  to the game. He was ignored by coaches and lampooned by writers.  And yet the team depended on him. “The kicker is despised but must be tolerated,” the academics wrote. For support they quoted interdisciplinary scholar Alex Karras (Lions lineman, Monday Night Football sideman, Mongo in Blazing Saddles): “I can’t stand those little jerks.”

A quarter century later, it’s time to consign the single-bar-facemask, I-keek-a-touchdown caricature of the kicker to the ash bin of football history. The average NFL kicker today goes 6 feet, 204—one inch taller and 20 pounds heavier than when UNLV enlightened the academy. While four of the 37 kickers currently on active rosters were born abroad, one of them is Canadian, which doesn’t count, and the other three went to high school in the U.S. With an average salary of about $1.2 million, placekickers aren’t even the lowest-paid NFL players anymore.

Read more. . .

My first piece for Play, the New York Times’s quarterly (or so) sports magazine, publishes this Sunday, Nov. 2 (but you can read it online now). It’s about the venerable Rooney family’s attempt to sell the Pittsburgh Steelers:

In 1933, a boxing promoter and horse-racing handicapper from the North Side of Pittsburgh named Art Rooney paid $2,500 for a franchise in the young National Football League. The team wouldn’t play for, let alone win, an N.F.L. championship in its first 40 years.

But then came Franco Harris and the “Immaculate Reception,” Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann and four Super Bowl titles in six seasons. The Pittsburgh Steelers earned a national following and a reputation as an elite organization. The year before his death in 1988, Rooney composed a letter on team stationery to his five sons. “Time is starting to run out on me,” he wrote. “I would like to reach some kind of an understanding so that there will be no questions or complications regarding my estate.” Rooney left each son $200,000 and an equal share of his 80 percent stake in the team.

Read more. . .

That’s the incredibly clever name I’ve given to my new weekly post on The Fifth Down, the New York Times’s NFL blog. As you might have guess from the title, I’m writing about–what else?–kicking.

My introductory post assesses the incredible season  that kickers are having thus far.

Post No. 2 is about why icing the kicker is a waste  of time.

Today’s entry begins like this:

As I was scanning the N.F.L. field-goal stats the other day — yes, I do that — something popped out. Old guys are doing remarkably well this season.

John Carney, the 44-year-old Giants kicker who is in his 20th season, has made 18 of 19 attempts—the lone miss was a ridiculous block against San Francisco — and leads the league in scoring. Jason Elam, 38, in his first season in Atlanta after 15 in Denver, is 16-for-17 with a 50-yarder. Carolina’s John Kasay, who has spent 18 of his 39 years on Earth in the N.F.L.—is a perfect 16-for-16.

Read more. . .

Two pieces that aren’t posted online (or at least not yet):

Sports Illustrated, July 14-21 issue, page 20.  “Are We Having Fun Yet? An NFL-embedded writer finds being a player isn’t the kick of a lifetime.” By me.

Entertainment Weekly, July 11, page 78. “An author you can’t refuse: A writer with no real sports training tried his hand–his foot, actually–at placekicking for the Denver Broncos.” By Jeff Labrecque.

Book tour starts tomorrow. Check here for a full list of events.

Welcome to the official blog infomercial for my new book, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-foot-8, 170-pound, 43-year-old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL. (Note to self: shorter subtitle next time; that takes forever to type.) My plans for this blog aren’t grand. I’ll link to all nice–and even not so nice–reviews, interviews and other media mentions, no matter how insignificant. I’ll deconstruct what people say about the book, because getting reviewed is an experience best shared with others. I’ll update and chronicle my book tour, which begins on Friday. And I’ll even occasionally write something that’s not about my book, the title of which, in case you missed it, is A Few Seconds of Panic.

AFSOP, as the kids are calling it, is about my summer as a placekicker in training camp with the Denver Broncos of the National Football League. You can read more here about how I talked an NFL team into letting me become the first writer since George Plimpton to dress up as a player in training camp.  It wasn’t that hard, actually. I believe it was Dave Barry who, when asked–possibly by himself–where reporters get their story ideas, replied, “thin air.” I was sitting at my desk in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal one day in 2005 and thought, why not a modern version of Paper Lion? A year and a half later I was undressing in front of a half dozen 300-pound offensive linemen.

The book was officially published yesterday. I’m grateful for the copious media it has received already, including reviews, articles or mentions in Time, Entertainment Weekly, Washingtonian magazine, New York Times.com, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNBC.com and elsewhere in the mainstream media. My interweb friends at Deadspin, Kissing Suzy Kolber and The Sporting News.com have been extremely kind.  You can read almost all of their words by going here and here.

Or you can bypass the critics and the fawners (well, I’m hoping there will be fawners) and just buy the book. Because what’s an informerical without a naked sales pitch?