That's it! I've had enough of icing the kicker! If you don't follow football, it's the practice of calling a timeout as the other team is about to kick a field goal; the purpose being to make the kicker think about it for an extra minute, and psych himself out or something. It's not likely to work of course; but for a last second play, the team has nothing to lose in trying it.
It's always annoyed me for adding an unnecessary delay to the climax of the game. It would be like having a quick commercial break before the kick. Possibly society that has gotten used to reality shows padding out the big reveal with edited-in pauses, but most people watching sports are trying to avoid that sort of thing.
It's also hard to believe it will have any effect. Kickers are used to performing under pressure. And kickers spend most of their time on the sidelines thinkin; I'm sure an extra minute to think about it won't make a difference. (Though the awkward practice kicks they do to kill the time might. ) Remember that this is a sport where a team of forty people occasionally depend on one person to succeed or fail based on one person's actions, and that person is easily the smallest of them.
I thought we'd reached the nadir of icing the kicker a few years ago when Joe Gibbs got confused and called a timeout twice, incurring a delay of game penalty. I didn't think it could any worse than a hall-of-game coach so crazed with the need to play mind games that he would end up hurting his own team. But then in today's Miami Beach Bowl, the coach of Brigham Young actually called a timeout to ice the kicker on an extra point. And this was with 45 seconds left. He essentially thought that it was more important to ice the kicker than run a good two-minute drill to get into range for what would have been a winning field goal. So please, let's ban timeouts on kicks.
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