Where Have You Gone, Garo Yepremian?
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
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.