Kickers Should Expand Range

Football’s leaders are the only chiefs in any sport who assign some of their most important plays to people who can’t play their game.

Football teams routinely bring in specialists from some other sport, usually soccer, to kick extra points and field goals. Many kick so expertly that their work is called automatic. And that’s why it came as such a shock when John Carney blew that extra-point try for New Orleans last Sunday after a unique 75-yard touchdown play.

When real football players score six points, Carney “always” adds the seventh.

In 408 NFL point-after chances, he has made 403.

Football should be played by football players. There would be more football in the NFL if kickers had to be football players. More teams would go for touchdowns instead of field goals if kicks weren’t automatic. Nothing else in football is automatic. Tacklers miss tackles. Running backs fumble.

In the computer era, a change would be easy to arrange. To become eligible to kick, players would have to play offense, defense or on special teams on at least, say, 10% of the snaps in the last five games. The NFL would issue an eligible-to-kick list each week. You’re not named? Sit down and watch the offense go for seven points instead of three.

Favre vs. No Defense

The Green Bay Packers (9-6), who will play the Denver Broncos (10-5) at Lambeau Field today on the last day of the regular season, are still in the playoff race after presenting Brett Favre as a phenomenal big-play passer Monday night in a 311-yards-passing production.

And that was just in the first half.

But Favre couldn’t have done it alone. He needed a pass defense that was as inept as Oakland’s in a 30-minute show that combined perhaps the best passing and shoddiest pass defense in the history of Monday night football.

On every third-down long ball -- and Favre completed half a dozen of them in Green Bay’s 31-7 first half -- two or three Raider defensive backs were in position to block the shot or intercept, if they’d had that in mind or if they knew how to do it. But on Green Bay’s big plays, no Packer receiver was bothered.

To complete 15 of 18 first-half passes, Favre, who finished as a 41-7 winner with 399 air yards, was putting the ball up for 20, 30 or 40 yards at a time. And it came down with rarely-before-seen accuracy. Even so, a good NFL defense would have put an end to all that instantly, if not sooner. Nobody should be able to complete one long pass after another in a competitive professional football game. It was as if Favre was playing with schoolchildren

His father and former coach, Irvin Favre, 58, had died the day before the game, apparently of a heart attack.

“My dad would have wanted me to play,” Favre said.

And play he did. He threw for four touchdowns in the first half, three on first-down plays after long third-down completions.

A first-down, long-pass touchdown is mostly a triumph of pass offense.

A third-down, long-pass completion is mostly a defeat for the pass defense -- which knows what’s coming and still plays helplessly.

It’s also a defeat for the defensive coaches, who have computers to tell them about tendencies and foibles. But Oakland’s coaches weren’t up against a computer. They were facing Favre.

Jamal Fastest

The Baltimore Ravens (9-6) will show off running back Jamal Lewis’ speed and power again today in a final bid for a 2,000-yard season -- against a 6-9 Pittsburgh team whose coach, Bill Cowher, has spent most of his life planning defenses for effective running backs.

Lewis, of course, is something different. He appears to be the NFL’s fastest big back since Jim Brown, the Hall of Famer who made the old Cleveland Browns the most feared offensive team in football in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

At 235 pounds, more or less, Lewis carries Jim Brown’s weight, though he’s more modern in height for the good running backs, 5 feet 11 to Brown’s 6-2. In today’s football, few 6-2 types are agile enough to get past the game’s larger, faster and more active defensive linemen.

During the Ravens’ Super Bowl victory four years ago, Lewis, coming off a leg injury, didn’t seem that fast or agile. But he’s been putting on speed, not weight.

This year’s Super Bowl problem for the Ravens is unchanged: Handing the ball to Lewis, can they run their way to the championship, without injuring and knocking out their opponents’ best quarterbacks, which they did last time?

As good as Lewis is, a Baltimore Super Bowl appearance this time seems unlikely. In the Cleveland game, the Ravens’ present passer, Anthony Wright, completed only 10 of 18 for 90 yards. Their designated passer, injured rookie Kyle Boller, went in for one throw and completed it for 10 yards. Their AFC opponents are guessing they’ll need more pass offense.

Plummer’s Team

Injuries are again reflected in the pro standings. In the AFC, Denver might have played postseason games at home if it hadn’t fallen behind the other contenders when it lost quarterback Jake Plummer to a broken leg for much of the early season. Since last summer, the Broncos, when Plummer is in there, have often seemed the NFL’s best team.

That continued last Sunday, when they went into Indianapolis and overpowered quarterback Peyton Manning and the other Colts, 31-17, on a day when reserve Denver tailbacks replaced injured Clinton Portis.

It is Plummer who drives the Broncos, not Portis. It is Plummer, that is, along with Coach Mike Shanahan.

Nor was it a real surprise that Denver put up 227 yards rushing in Indianapolis (to 78 for Edgerrin James and the other Colt runners) with substitutes carrying the ball for the Broncos.

Throughout the reign of Shanahan and his assistant head coach, Alex Gibbs, the Broncos have run powerfully and productively with every back they have handed the ball to since the first one, Terrell Davis.

Next month, during the AFC playoff series, the Broncos, unless a blizzard is raging in New England, will have a better shot against the Patriots than Kansas City, Indianapolis, Baltimore or warm-weather Tennessee would. For one thing, on a frozen field, the Denver running game figures stronger than New England’s. For another, Plummer can more nearly hold his own with the league’s best quarterback, Tom Brady of the Patriots, than any rival -- unless Tennessee’s Steve McNair recovers wholly from his many injuries.

Hard-Working Rams

The St. Louis Rams (12-3), as coached by Mike Martz, have been attacking their opponents this year with the NFL’s most inventive offense. In great part, it is their coach’s ingenuity and style that will put Martz’s players in the postseason with the NFC’s top record if they win today at Detroit.

Yet as imaginative as the Rams are, they may have to be more so -- in two respects -- to win their way through a strong field in the playoffs:

* Because they have the game-time resources to start faster and more dominantly than they have in most games this season, the Rams may need to do that.

* And if they need to be more effective on the last 10 or 20 yards of a 100-yard field, they have the resources for the best of all red-zone formations: four good wide receivers (or three and a tight end) fronting a backfield with one back, the clever Marshall Faulk.

The Rams, to score their NFC-high 400-plus points this season, have had to work harder than they should have.

Aggressive Passing

The ideal way for the Rams to perform is the way they often played in Martz’s first years, passing aggressively in the first half to take a dominant lead, then calling creative ground plays in the second half to protect that lead.

They got the second part of the deal right in last week’s game, but not the first.

For much of the final 30 minutes, Martz called one well-designed running play after another for Faulk -- each a bit different from the others. He carried the ball repeatedly to protect a lead that grew by 10 points in the second half.

Until the last 47 seconds of the first half, however, it was a 10-10 tie, which said more for the Bengals, who were on the road in a noisy dome. It was that close because the Rams opened the game tentatively, handing the ball to Faulk on first-down plays and calling other safe plays instead of using quarterback Marc Bulger to throw downfield passes.

One Faulk power play failed on fourth down when his lead blocker led the defense into the hole to stop the play, as the NFL’s lead blockers so frequently do.

The problem for any running back in any first half is that he’s running into defensive linemen who are rested and eager. They can lie in wait. For example, during Baltimore tailback Lewis’ 205-yard day Sunday, he was held to 41 yards in the first half.

Defensive linemen tend to tire in the second half, particularly if they have spent the first half chasing a mobile passer.

The second half is the time to run a back such as Faulk. The first half, ideally, is for aggressive passing.

Red-Zone Offense

The ideal red-zone formation, which would strengthen the Rams if they used it on nearly every down, combines four wide receivers with one back.

Four receivers stretch the field horizontally and spread the defense, which is the way you want it down there, particularly when the one back is as tricky as Ram tailback Faulk.

Consider:

* On quick-pass plays, four receivers -- five, if Faulk is in the pattern -- could be heading anywhere. If they are good enough, as the Rams’ receivers are, one of the four or five will often be at least slightly open, which is often all Bulger needs.

* On running plays, Faulk, facing a defense featuring smaller players spread more widely than the bulky athletes who mass in front of typical goal-line power formations, will frequently slip through a crack somewhere.

Faulk isn’t a power runner. He is a fast, active hunt-and-peck runner of the most scintillating sort. If there’s a hole in a stretched-out line, he’ll find it. In fact, the single back in a four-wide-receiver set often walks into the end zone unopposed.

The defensive team must think run as well as pass down there. So aggressive passing best fits this red-zone approach.

On first down at an opponent’s 20-yard line, there is more maneuver room for four or five receivers than they will find on first down at the 10.

And on first and goal at the 10, there’s more maneuver room for pass catchers than there will be on later plays closer to the end zone.

So, first down is a better passing down at the top of the red zone (or at the 10-yard line) than third and goal later is almost anywhere else. And no team is better staffed than the Rams for red-zone passes.