Jon Laging, Sports talk

A couple of days ago I read a football column wondering why no one was talking about the NFL attendance being down. That if you watched a game from Jacksonville or Arizona last season you saw a lot of empty seats.

Well, the reason you don’t hear anything is there isn’t a problem. Most NFL games are sell-outs, even exhibition games. However, this unexpected observation got me thinking. Professional football doesn’t seem to be as all consuming as it once was. The talk around the water cooler and at coffee during the football season don’t lead to as many arguments and thrown doughnuts as it once did.

Recently, I was talking football with a friend and he mentioned there was a dropkick made in the NFL last year. He was absolutely right, there was an extra point dropkick made by quarterback Doug Flutie of the New England Patriots in their last regular season game.

The days when dropkicks played an important role in football have long disappeared. The pinnacle of drop kicking was reached when Yale’s all-american, 144-pound Albie Booth beat Harvard 3-0 with a drop kick in a game’s last moments back in the days when both were football powers.

That’s a long time ago.

The pros last field goal dropkick was made in 1937 with the last extra point dropkick coming in 1941. The football had been made more spherical in 1934 to increase passing proficiency and the dropkick was (dropped) outdated as a true bounce was needed when you dropped the ball to the ground.

Nevertheless, dropkick rules have remained in the NFL’s official rule book. Rule 3, section 8, defines the dropkick as: &8220;a kick by the kicker who drops the ball and kicks it immediately after it touches the ground.&8221;

Although the pros abandoned the dropkick, it was still being practiced by guys in the early 50s. There was a kicking game where two youngsters stood about 30 yards apart and kicked the football back and forth, trying to get it over a designated line. The first ball over the line, not caught, was the winner. If the ball was dropkicked over the line, you got two points rather than one. It was a fun game, but hard on the shoes.

The more I thought about dropkick field goals and their demise, almost 70 years ago, the more I thought about a possible dropkick comeback. But pro football really doesn’t need any promotional game changes right now. Not only that, football shares with baseball an ongoing tradition of rules remaining the same through the years. Basketball changes from year to year with the 24 second clocks, 3-point shots, etc. But, football remains static. Sure, formations and defenses change, but the size of the field, first downs and points made don’t change.

However, if they ever do have attendance problems, what I’m proposing would be innovative and probably help attendance. How about making the dropkick an important part of the game? What about making a field goal dropkick worth five points?

Wow, supposing a team was trailing by four points with seconds left. Try a dropkick. It would change the entire flow of the game. You would have players practicing dropkicks. The best player to attempt the kick would be the quarterback since the defense would never know he was going back to pass, run, or kick. Football would return to the old triple-threat back quarterbacks would be judged on how well they could execute the dropkick. Brad Johnson might become known as an excellent field general, good passer, but bad dropkicker. Games might be ten to five and coaches would have additional headaches. “He’s a good coach, but he doesn’t know how to use the dropkick.”

Remember when this column is long gone, that you heard the dropkick revival here first.