A recurrent subject here at iSteve over the years has been the career of Chris Sailer, who graduated from Notre Dame H.S. in Sherman Oaks, CA 18 years after I did. (We’re not closely related — the name Sailer is a little more common than you might think.) A legendary high school football field goal kicker and an All-American at UCLA, Sailer didn’t make it in the NFL. But he has since revolutionized placekicking tutoring in ways that offer a variety of insights into more general trends in our society.

From the NYT:

Skill Level of N.F.L. Kickers? It’s Good. Really Good.

By JOE LEMIRE DEC. 24, 2014 At 42, Indianapolis Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri is one game away from becoming the fourth kicker in N.F.L. history to convert every single kick over a full season. He has made all 47 extra points and all 28 field goals, including three of at least 50 yards. Yet it is the overall rate of success these days that is truly intriguing. This season, N.F.L. kickers have converted 62.5 percent of field-goal attempts beyond 50 yards. In Vinatieri’s rookie season, in 1996, that 62.5 percent rate was roughly the league standard on kicks between 40 and 49 yards. Twenty years before that, in the 1970s, kicks between 30 and 39 yards were made that often. … Kickers have been successful on 83.9 percent of all field-goal attempts this season, the third-highest rate on record, trailing only last year’s 86.5 percent and 2008’s 84.5 percent. The 11 seasons with the highest rates are the 11 most recent seasons. …

My guess would be that fan excitement is maximized when the chance of success or failure is around 50-50 rather than today’s 84-16. George Blanda won an MVP in 1970 as a backup quarterback and placekicker, in part because field goal kicking was so hit or miss that any hits made the kicker look heroic rather than merely competent.

Of the top 15 kickers in career field-goal percentage, 12 are active. The most accurate kicker in league history is the Baltimore Ravens’ Justin Tucker (89.6 percent). Tucker is one-tenth of one percentage point ahead of the Dallas Cowboys’ Dan Bailey, who until Sunday was alone above 90 percent for his career; a 52-yard miss put him in second place, at 89.5 percent. … The pivotal step in his development — as with most younger kickers — was attending a privately run camp, run by Chris Sailer Kicking. Sailer, 37, a two-time all-American kicker and punter at U.C.L.A., has become the nation’s pre-eminent kicking instructor; he says 13 of the 32 starting N.F.L. kickers attended his camps. … When Sailer went to U.C.L.A. in 1995, he was one of about a dozen kickers and punters to have a scholarship, he estimated. Vinatieri had a partial grant to Division II South Dakota State in the early 1990s. Now, the majority of Division I programs offer scholarships for specialists, all of them full rides, with camps and showcases helping college coaches recruit because wind does not appear on game film. … Also valuable to kickers has been a concurrent increase in scholarships for long snappers, and Sailer’s kicking camp has a companion run by the former U.C.L.A. long snapper Chris Rubio. … Folk raved about the precision of his long snapper, Tanner Purdum, who monitors the rotations and velocity of his snaps. Likening the ball to a clock face, Folk said the ideal was for his holder to receive the ball with the laces on top, in the 12 o’clock position, so that he could set the ball straight down without adjustment.

The NFL is vastly profitable at the moment so it has few incentives to innovate with the rules. (It has been experimenting with the Pro Bowl all-star game to make it more interesting.) But it’s about time to try out new rules to make kicking less of a sure thing that only draws attention to placekickers when they fail.

It would be pretty easy to bring together, say, 8 top NFL placekickers during the off-season for a TV trashsport in which they compete at various feats of strength and skill involving potential kicking challenges that could someday be incorporated in the rules: kicking field goals and extra points from extreme angles; kicking with higher cross bars; kicking with a top to the goal like in soccer so kicks must be kept lower; dropkicking; bending kicks in the manner of David Beckham; making the goal a netted rectangle 8 to 18 feet off the ground and let the other kicker play goaltender, and so forth.

Let the experts try these goofball ideas out and see what the public likes.

One problem with kicking competitions is that they require about half a football stadium, and that makes for some glum television if the stadium is empty and silent. However, big football crowds do assemble during the off-season in college football stadiums for the spring intra-team scrimmages that help determine who will start in the fall. Alabama and Auburn, for example, come close to filling their stadiums with their most ardent fans in the spring. An ESPN off-season trashsport could probably piggyback off those crowds who would likely happily show up early or stay late to cheer an hour-long kicking contest involving top NFL kickers trying out oddball challenges.