Aug 24 2009 10:53 AM
Not the least surprising that the punting into the huge video screen was a known problem
| By JUDY BATTISTA Published: August 24, 2009 For fans of special teams — or maybe pinball — Dec. 13 just became the best day on the N.F.L. schedule. That’s when the San Diego Chargers, with their high-kicking punter Mike Scifres, play the Dallas Cowboys, ensuring that everybody will pay more attention than ever to hang time. The Cowboys have played exactly one game in their new billion-dollar palace, only to find — just like new homeowners everywhere — that there are a few kinks to be worked out. Of course, everything is bigger in Texas (a T-shirt for sale on the Cowboys’ Web site features a picture of the new stadium with the promise “Ours is bigger!”) and this is a rather prominent kink: mammoth high-definition video screens that are 60 yards wide, 71 feet high and apparently hung too low, at 90 feet above the field. On Friday night, the N.F.L. learned that punters have better legs than Jerry Jones thought when the backup A. J. Trapasso, who might have improved his N.F.L. stock with the leg strength he showed, thunked the underside of the screen during the game; his punt ricocheted back to the field and confusion ensued. And the N.F.L. got on the case. On Monday, Ray Anderson, the league’s executive vice president for football operations, said he would be at Dallas’s next preseason game, Saturday night against San Francisco, to see the screens for himself. But first, he planned to hold conference calls with members of the competition committee in the next few days to discuss options. The bottom line: the N.F.L. will not go into the regular season with the situation unresolved because it does not want games that count affected by what amounts to a large television. “Competitive issues and integrity of the game is the primary focus,” Anderson said in a telephone interview Monday morning. “If there is interference with a key play of a game, we have to have a response to how we deal with it.” Anderson said that included the possibility of the most obvious solution: telling Jones to raise the screen, something Jones seemed reluctant to do when asked about it Friday night. It’s not that Jones was unaware of the potential problem. Before he personally helped set the height at just about the league minimum — how’s that for attention to detail? — tests were run with Cowboys punter Mat McBriar, who cleared 100 feet. And when reporters in the Dallas area were given a tour of the stadium this year, at least one noticed how low the screen looked. So why weren’t the screens set higher? Because this stadium is known colloquially as Jerry’s World and Jones reasoned that most punters try to place the ball in a specific spot, usually near a sideline, not launch it to the moon. “That’s a reasonable argument, but it’s not a complete argument,” the Jets’ special teams coach, Mike Westhoff, said. “Scifres punts it up to God. On a directional punt, it’s not like you line-drive it out of bounds. You’re forced by some formations to keep it in the middle and you’re forced to kick it up as high as possible.” “If anybody hit the screen, it’s dramatically too low,” Westhoff added. “I was really shocked.” Westhoff was the Miami Dolphins’ special teams coach when Reggie Roby, an exceptionally strong-legged punter, was with the team. Roby used to go into domed stadiums and try to hit the scoreboards that hung over the field during warm-ups. He never did, Westhoff said. Scifres, so renowned for how high he kicks that it is mentioned in his official team biography, can make the Chargers’ December visit to Dallas intriguing if the N.F.L. chooses not to have the screens raised. That would present a myriad of issues for Anderson and the competition committee: for one, nobody on an officiating crew is assigned to watch the flight of the ball on a punt, so who will see it if Scifres or anybody else nails one of the screens? “Replay was not designed for those types of things,” said Titans Coach Jeff Fisher, a co-chairman of the competition committee, who threw his red challenge flag as soon as his punter hit the screen Friday. “As a coach, I certainly don’t want to be forced to use a challenge for that because your challenge opportunities, there’s a premium on those.” And if someone does hit the screen, should the punting team get a do-over? Special teams players are already at slightly greater injury risk than players on regular plays from scrimmage, so the do-over is not terribly appealing. And punters, Trapasso said, may try to take something off a punt to avoid the screen, which can affect distance. And should time be put back on the clock for a do-over? Westhoff suggested the N.F.L. take a page from baseball and adopt ground rules specific to Cowboys Stadium. Westhoff said a punt that hit a scoreboard could run about 10 seconds off the clock: two seconds from snap to kick, at least five seconds of hang time for a punter like Scifres and another few seconds from the time it hit the board to when the play was whistled dead. “Then you do it again, and then do it again and again and that’s 40 seconds and the game is over,” Westhoff said. “What do you do then? Do you start the clock when a guy catches it in field of play? Do you go back and put time back on the clock?” “It will be like baseball,” Westhoff added. “Come out for the coin flip, exchange lineup cards and go over the ground rules.” Jones, who has taken enormous pride in showing off every inch of the new stadium, pointed out that his stadium met the league specifications for how low a screen can hang. “How high is high if somebody just wants to sit there and kick straight up?” he said Friday night. But the Cowboys will raise the screen at least once in October for Bono. No, not the former journeyman quarterback Steve Bono. U2 is performing Oct. 12 and its stage has to fit. |
