Football, Unemployment, and Hypothermia

I'll be honest, i didn't really care who won the Giants-Packers game yesterday. I guess I went into the game rooting for the Packers, but as things went on, I couldn't really bring myself to care. So when Lawrence Tynes stepped up in overtime to kick a 47-yard field goal, I had to root for him because, in the end, it meant more to him than anyone else.

Kickers are the NFL version of a fungible good. Pretty much every NFL kicker will hit 85 percent of his kicks, while a great kicker will 90 percent. Which, over the course of a season, is one or two extra field goals. A bad kicker will hit 80 percent of his kicks and end up unemployed. The line between being great and bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly is razor thin. So when a kicker misses not one, not two, but THREE crucial kicks in one game, you can bet even money that he won't even be on the team charter home. And that no other team will bother to pick him up.

If Tynes had missed that kick, he would not only be out of a job... his career would essentially be over. Considering the average kicker makes about a half of a million dollars each year, and Tynes probably could continue to toil in anonymity for another four years or so, it's not much of a reach to say the kick was worth about two million dollars to him. And frankly, I'd hate to see a guy lose two million dollars because he couldn't kick a frozen solid football over forty yards in a swirling wind. He could have had one of the worst professional days ever. And I didn't really want to watch a guy's career end on national television. so I'm happy for the guy.

Instead, the big losers of the day are these three girls.


Woo hoo! Frostbite is so much cooler when you make it on TV! Who else thinks these girls are currently in the Green Bay hospital receiving intravenous fluids to recuperate from hypothermia?