Birkett: Making kicks harder a priority for NFL owners

Adam Vinatieri is, by any measure, one of the best kickers in NFL history.

He played 10 seasons for the New England Patriots and twice was named first-team All-Pro. He just finished his ninth season with the Indianapolis Colts and had his most accurate year, making 30 of 31 field goals. He has authored some of the most clutch kicks in league history. And this year, he should pass Jason Hanson for third on the NFL's all-time scoring list.

So it's no surprise that Vinatieri's struggles in this year's Pro Bowl — when the NFL experimented with narrow goalposts and the distance of extra points — helped convince the league that more tinkering likely is needed before drastic changes are made.

Kicking 33-yard extra points on uprights that were 14 feet apart instead of their usual 18 feet, 6 inches, Vinatieri missed two of four PATs and a 38-yard field goal.

"Not a big fan (of the narrow goalposts)," Vinatieri said after the game. "It makes it a lot more difficult, obviously. I was looking at my kicks, and I believe I would have probably made them all on normal goalposts, and unfortunately I didn't. I didn't do it today. I need a lot more work on those skinny posts, and it's going to be a game-changer if they decide to do that."

The NFL is not considering shrinking the goalposts for this season, though the topic of how to make kicks more difficult will be discussed among other proposals in Arizona at the owners meetings this week.

"The league office looked at the idea of what would the percentage made be from the various yard lines if you moved (the uprights) in to 16 feet or you moved it in to 14 feet," Rich McKay, chairman of the league's competition committee, said in a conference call last week. "There's no recommended change for 2015. The idea is that maybe we'll do some experimenting in the preseason, potentially, and certainly in the Pro Bowl in the off-season next year at 16 feet, moving the goalposts in 2 feet and some inches and just see how the impact is on the make rate that we currently have right now, which is extremely high."

Last year, the NFL experimented with longer PATs in the exhibition season, and the Patriots resubmitted a proposal this past week to spot the ball on extra points at the 15-yard line, making them 33-yard attempts.

Historically, club proposals stand less a chance of passing than those that come from the competition committee, but the debate about making extra points more difficult has been raging for some time and is causing some to think outside the box.

The Colts submitted an alternate proposal that wouldn't affect the distance of extra points but might encourage more two-point tries. Under Indianapolis' proposal, teams that convert a two-point attempt would be given a "bonus" 50-yard field goal that, if made, would give the kicking team one point, or nine points total for the touchdown (six for the TD, two for the two-point conversion and the bonus point).

McKay said he can't recall another proposal that changed the scoring rules of the game. The NFL adopted the two-point conversion in 1994, though it widely was used in college football, the Canadian Football League and the old American Football League before that.

"As we go through the process this week, we'll let (the Colts) go ahead and discuss it in more detail," said St. Louis Rams coach Jeff Fisher, a member of the committee.

Beyond potential changes to extra points, teams will consider 13 instant-replay proposals this week, including one by the Lions to make all fouls identified by game officials subject to challenge.

Lions general manager Martin Mayhew acknowledged Wednesday that the proposal has little chance of passing this year, but said he expects the NFL to amend its replay rules in the near future after more discussions.

Owners also will vote on proposals requiring both teams to possess the ball in overtime, an expanded definition of the defenseless-player rule and limiting where normally eligible players who report as ineligible can line up on the field.

McKay said the competition committee also will update its position on an expanded playoff field ("we don't think there's any negative to the expansion of the playoffs" from a competitive standpoint, he said) and tweak language on the Calvin Johnson catch/no-catch rule, though he declined to share specifics.

"We have great history with this rule, and we have history with this rule," McKay said. "We spent a lot of time looking at the language itself and then looking at the plays, and we just made some recommendations with respect to the language. I think it'd be better if we waited till Monday and we show it to the membership before we share it with the media."

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.