They do make headcheese outa heads . . . but I still agree about the placekicking.

As a Patriots' fan, I have to object.

If the Giants had a better kicker, like Mr. Vinatieri, they would have won the game.

"That King Kaufman was right! Placekicking drags down our great sport. Football games should be decided by football players making football plays -- and yes, I know the word 'foot' is in football. The word "head" is in head cheese, but they don't make it out of heads."

Alas, King Kaufman was in fact wrong. Head cheese is made out of heads. See http://www.foodreference.com/html/fheadcheese.html.

And I disagree with Mr. Kaufman's opinion too. Field goals are "football plays" -- almost by definition. They are dramatic and can't be set up absent football players making football plays to get advantageous field position. Successful field goals involve blocking and proper snapping and the whole coordinated series of improbable events that mark other football plays. They just involve another specialist -- the kicker -- who plays but little, looks small compared to his teammates and may speak with an accent.

But kicking is still part of the game. Leave it alone, please.

King,

Your screed against the NFL kicking game was the perfect chance to talk up yet another great CFL Grey Cup final. Unlike the Superbowl (with perhaps a couple exceptions in my lifetime), the Grey Cup is routinely a barn burner. Not to mention, the CFL kicking game is far superior to the NFL one - no fair catches, no touchbacks or downed punts, and missed FGs are live balls...

Without FGs, how would U of Miami fans taunt Florida State fans for the better part of a decade?

Ok, it's totally predictable in a King Kaufman column, especially one about field goals, that you are going to get a least a single slanging comment about real football (or what some of you so quaintly call "soccer"). In this piece he actually manages to make two. But still, in his list of boring sporting events he leaves out a really obvious one--six out of nine innings of any average major league baseball game. Talk about watching paint dry! But then King has his own little peccadillos, such as doing his best to maintain that there's something significant about a "world series" in which Chicago manages to deafeat...who was that again? Some little local team from Texas I believe, but the name slips my mind. Oh well, it is his column afer all, and he's allowed to be as parochial as he wishes.

I have to disagree with King on nearly every level here - placekicking is NOT inherently boring and the drama leading up to a potential game-winner is tremendously exciting. If you are referring to the 2-3 seconds of the ball flying through the air part, is it less dramatic than watching a 40 yard throw hurl through the air wondering if the receiver will catch it?

Why not ask Bill Parcells, whose entire career was built on a SuperBowl victory snatched from the foot of a mythically maligned kicker, Scott Norwood. Or ask The Genius in Foxboro where he would be without his useless kicker?

Finally, as the end of the year approaches, is there some unmet sportswriter quota on disses to soccer? If you have no appreciation of watching a world-class player like Ronaldinho or Henry blast a ball from 25 yards out into extreme upper 90, then I guess there is nothing else to say.

I agree with King completely. Get rid of the kicker in Football, no field goals, no extra points kicks, no kick-offs. As far as the kick-offs, hell, just adopt the touch football rules of having someone throw the ball deep.

When we get rid of the field goal, the NFL should adopt the rule that you get 2 points when you get the ball past the 20-yard line. So you get 2 points when an team get the ball to the 20-yard line, four more points for scoring a touchdown and 1 point for the point after touchdown. This will make the end of the close games more exciting, knowing that a team only has to get it to the 20 yard line to win a tie or one-point game.

obviously, a couple of letters have already sprung up about the fact that head cheese is in fact made from heads, but really, it's a simple enough fix for king if he wants to go back and change the article:

"The word "cheese" is in head cheese, but it's definitely not cheese."

Bukk63 beat me to it, but...

Yes, in fact, they do make headcheese out of heads. Some other parts as well, but mostly heads.

Perhaps a better way to have put it would have been:

"The word 'cheese' is in head cheese, but there's no actual cheese involved."

King, I know you don't like soccer, so it's useless for me to protest, but I'll do so anyway. Just watch some World Cup games next year and you'll be swayed. There is no sporting event in the world that can match the World Cup -- not in the U.S. or anywhere; not even the Olympics. There are literally billions of people across the world that will be glued to the Cup games next summer.

Apparently we Americans prefer our sports chopped up into bite-sized slices, with commercial breaks at every opportunity, plus any number of time outs and network breaks to further delay the action. We end up watching as much inaction in baseball and football as action, and the overwhelming majority of pitches or offensive plays have no excitement in them whatsoever.

Soccer, on the other hand, is continuous, with pauses kept to a minimum and a clock that stops only for halftime. There is constant activity, and possession of the ball can be swapped several times per minute. There's always something there to hold your attention ... and yet you find it more boring than baseball or football?

Perhaps this says more about the state of the American attention span than anything else. Soccer is far and away the most popular sport in the world. Not in America, though -- we can't live without our commercial breaks.

It's sad, really.