Those Bastards -- They Killed Kicking!

Not quite, and not yet — but here’s a football story I missed during the regular season:

In a league where the pinnacle is Super, the point after touchdown is entirely superfluous.

What play, other than the clock-killing kneel down, is so virtually automatic? There were 1,191 extra-point tries during the 2013 regular season, and four misses, all of which were blocked, one each by Chicago, Jacksonville, Cincinnati and Detroit.

For millions of viewers, the PAT is nothing more than time to get up and stretch, head to the bathroom, maybe channel surf.

So it was welcome news this week when Commissioner Roger Goodell told NFL Network that this off-season the league’s competition committee will look into abolishing the extra point. The concept would be to make all touchdowns worth seven points, and teams that go for what’s now a two-point conversion would either gain or lose a point, making the score worth eight or six.

So the solution to kickers being just too darned good at what they do is to introduce a new play, totally optional, where for the first time in the history of the sport a team could lose a point?

That’s just dumb.