Gene Collier: Why are coaches taking the foot out of football?

PITTSBURGH — There were vivid flashback moments within this culminating football season, strange but still eidetic sports memories I'm only now coming to understand, having to do with kiddie soccer.

You heard me.

My wife and I are standing on the sidelines of some suburban greenscape, in some previous century when one of the boys was playing the kind of soccer where the athletes barely come up to your waist and move around the field in a small knot of little humans who are kicking each other almost as often as the ball.

The flashback is of the chirping encouragement from the parents: "Kick it, Kyle! Kick it, Katy! Kick it, Kaitlyn! Kick it, Kevin! Kick it, Kirsten! Kick it, Kody!"

Good advice, obviously.

So flash forward three or four decades to the football season of 2025, the one when the biggest brains in the sport definitively took the foot out of football, eschewing the punt and openly loathing the field goal to the point of psychosis.

And I'm doing it again: "Kick it, Payton! Kick it, Tomlin! Kick it, Harbaugh! Kick it, Campbell! Kick it, McVay!"

Why does no one want to kick the ball? It is, after all, football. It's the first syllable.

This still relatively new fourth-down fortitude — "We're going for it because we're always aggressive and we play to win and we don't live in our fears" — never seems to acknowledge that uncomfortable flip side: "And yeah, sometimes we're stupid."

Often enough, going for it on fourth down is the correct choice, a power play with favorable odds that you can now find on your sideline touchscreen just by googling fourth-and-1, or whatever your situational football predicament. Unfortunately, we've now reached a place where the analytics have obscured everything including the dynamics of time and place, such as, oh I don't know, the day of the AFC championship game in snow-threatened Denver.

Just for example.

Miraculously leading the Patriots 7-0 while deploying a backup quarterback who'd be coming apart soon enough, Denver coach Sean Payton watched someone named Jarrett Stidham drive the Broncos to the New England 14 early in the second quarter.

On fourth-and-1, maybe you've heard, Payton passed up a 31-yard field goal that would have put his team up 10-0 an hour before a blizzard, decided to call a pass play instead with a passer who hadn't passed even once this year until about an hour ago, and now it's being argued that he likely kept the Broncos out of the Super Bowl.

Because good. Because incomplete. Because Denver never scored again and lost 10-7. Because "kick it Payton kick it Payton kick it Payton!"

Really, save your analytics adventures for when you're flying around on some sunny Mile High Sunday in October. When you're trying to break into the Super Bowl with a backup quarterback, take the points, the three points that come in 31 yards of bubble-wrapped probability at 94%.

I'm not saying that Payton should know it was 94% likely he'll go up 10-0, or that the conversion probability for a generic fourth-and-1 is only 67%, or that the same probability with a pass play is only 58%. He probably does know those things. I'm saying that in the moment, he decided to reject nearly 40 years of his own coaching experience, not to mention any lessons gleaned as one of the 1987 Pittsburgh Gladiators, and picked that moment last Sunday to stop making sense.

"There's always regrets," he said in the cold aftermath. "It's also a call you make based on the team you're playing and what you're watching on the other side of the ball. Yeah, there's always going to be second thoughts."

Payton said that in "hindsight" the original running play he called "was a better decision." Uh-huh. As a coach I know once said, "Hindsight is 50-50," but an even better decision would have been a field-goal attempt.

This may be the era of fourth-down fortitude — teams are going for it at twice the rate of only 10 years ago and nearly three times as often as they did in the 1980s — but it's also an era when kickers have never been better, and that can be said for both punters and placekickers.

Net punting averages are consistently at or near the all-time high, but coaches are punting at record-low rates. So called four-down territory is a synonym for urban sprawl, in many cases extending back across midfield. Field-goal kickers are capable from greater distances all the time — Jacksonville's Cam Little drilled one 68 yards in November — but coaches are turning up their noses at the makable 3.

In the NFC title game just two years ago, Detroit's Dan Campbell, always the picture of fourth-down testosterone, went for it against San Francisco when a field goal would have put the Lions up by 17. The Niners came back to win, and the Lions, who've never been to a Super Bowl, have not won a playoff game since.

Remember all this when the NFL moves, maybe this offseason, to consider narrowing the goal posts to make it harder for kickers who'll soon be able to slay you from 70 yards.

For now, no one's making it harder than coaches.

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