Lechler's punt on the Texans and the Raiders silver lining

The NFL's best punter, Shane Lechler, has signed with the Houston Texans after 13 seasons with the Oakland Raiders, and fans in the Bay Area are surely kicking themselves.

Oakland won't be short of people swinging their boots, if that's what you were thinking.

Lechler signed a three-year $5.5 million deal with the Texans, significantly lower than what the late Al Davis was willing to pay him---a record punting fee of $16 million for four years back in 2008. But economies have since collapsed, Twinkies have faced extinction, and Justin Timberlake does everything now except run the Vatican. Times have changed.

Despite the fact he's only 36, and plans to play 20 seasons in all (which would mean seven more), the Raiders are clearly not seeing Lechler in the same light. Assuming they are wearing their eye patches over the correct eye, it may be because the punter's net yards were slightly down last season.

Net yards seem very important to NFL teams, even though the punter has no real control over that statistic---not unless he's sprinting down field after scratching his nose with the toe of his cleat, and wrestling the punt returner into the grass himself. I'm not sure that even Usain Bolt could achieve such a feat, though wouldn't be surprised if a pro football team similarly forked out $16 million for the service.

Lechler netted 39 yards per punt last season, lower than his career average of about 41. This type of discrepancy causes more panic in pro football clubhouses than warm Gatorade. But he has booted 47 yards per punt over his career, not including the adjustment of returns or penalties. This should count for, well, everything, because it relates to the actual distance of his kicks.

Lechler has also admitted that he rushed back from a knee injury last season, and that it took him a month to be back on his game. "During the second half of the season, I felt like I was back to my old self," he told reporters in Houston recently.

Of course, there are many other aspects that factor into punting, and the associated squad that charges towards the man returning, such as the amount of time the ball hangs in the air. Lechler has been consistent on all of these fronts for many years, which is why so many people regard him as the best punter ever. You only need to scan his career stats to realize this. For example, Lechler kicked for 4,503 yards for an average of 47 yards per punt in 2003. His net average per punt that season was just 37 yards. That particular campaign, the Raiders won just four games, and were obliterated on the road (0-8). Not surprisingly then, returners tallied 699 yards on Lechler's 2003 punt total.

Last season, Lechler punted for 3,826 yards all up, with returners only logging 450 yards. So while he punted for fewer yards, they were likely more effective kicks with a better net average per punt than during the monster year, nine seasons earlier. So, I'm not certain I see the Raiders logic here in letting Lechler go, because up or down, he's been relatively consistent.

We do know that the Raiders picked up Marquette King in last draft, who supposedly has more leg than Heidi Klum. For Fort Valley State University in 2011, King led his team's conference in punting with a 43 yards per punt average, and 16 of them were for 50 yards or more. And due to a towering 80-yarder once, his legend has preceded his NFL career.

So Oakland and its fan base are no doubt giddy at the prospect of King. But Lechler's shoes are mighty ones to fill, especially before an intimidating audience of pirates, ghouls and skeleton bikers.

Good luck, kid.

It's a different NFL era, does it have to be?

Football may have reached a cultural crossroads considering its hyper popularity conflicting with its hyper violence. But is it just the victim of a hyper perfect society?

As Grantland's Chuck Klosterman says in a recent column, it might be a nonexistent intersection, which will never reach a conclusion. But I wonder if we were able to simplify our collective thinking so that it more closely resembled the way we used to be before the Unlimited Information Era, then perhaps we could slow down football, and in turn, dial some of its issues down to a more manageable level.

Now I'm not talking about concussions specifically, because as we know, head injuries have become a rather grim and sad indictment of today's full-contact NFL football. I'm speaking more broadly about the way people function today, and the way many football players function today - with this sort of pseudo-bravado and hunger to be not only the best, but the most visible, the one who hits the hardest, delivers the most damage, or appears on SportsCenter most often. It seems for many NFL players, the literal conquering of the opposition, is more important than making a sound play. Intensity has been replaced by ferocity. Physical dominance has been replaced by brutality. If this is what is important to so many, as the New Orleans bounty case has shown us, then what hope have we of quelling the unnecessary component of football's violence? And when we say unnecessary, we must consider the excess violence that some players partake in. 

The argument we commonly hear is that football is a violent game and that's that. But we might also conclude that football has never been more violent than it is right now, and it's because many of the people playing the game consider themselves an extension of the tackle - they are weapons. These individuals are part of that hyper perfect society - overly engineered, over achieving Terminator types - who show all the concern for their on-field colleagues as a drunk driver. Can't football be played with a degree of responsibility? Well, of course, it can be.

When pro football players wore leather helmets, and labored through slow, muddied and grinding affairs, in which running, not passing, was a special commodity, we imagine there were less brutal injuries. We believe this because at a slower pace, with less equipment, men were less able to intentionally damage others, and as a result, their minds weren't geared towards it. Of course, the game became more dynamic, people grew bigger, moved closer to perfect, and were equally equipped with the latest technology - the hyper society complicated a simple game of yardage. 

But launching at another man with a cannonball atop your shoulders isn't really football, is it? It's an attempt to sideline someone. If that's football, the game of great athletes, clever tactics, and unparalleled story lines then I must have missed something.

There are no easy answers to dealing with violent sports. But other games manage. Rugby is played by more than a hundred nations, for example, and you rarely see the type of horrific collisions in rugby that you see in pro football. And to the naked eye, rugby is a far more bruising affair than the NFL. That's because the game's owners, and supporters, and protagonists, cling to the tradition of the task - not to merely the way the task looks. They're committed to the skill and strategy, to tackling with the right techniques, and less to the spectacle. The NFL is spectacular, and moves pretty fast, and we love it. But some of its people need to stop and take a look around every once in a while, or they could miss it. 

Best Super Bowl ad - for football fans

The ads from this year's Super Bowl have charged a range of emotions and in some cases appear to have clouded all judgement. Of course, deciding which ad is best is like ranking the NFL's greatest ever teams: it's a completely arbitrary exercise with inherent biases. What makes a commercial good anyway? Its originality? Its artistry? Whether it makes you laugh or cry? Whether you recall the product thirty minutes later? Because it features dogs? Maybe its all of the above.

It's been reported that 111 million people watched the big game Sunday, so we can safely assume that at least a few of these people saw the ads. And apparently, as reported by Clickz, the dancing M&Ms effort was the most Tweeted. It was also rated as the most effective by other industry measures. But can we really ever know the effectiveness of an ad? While numbers reveal instant reaction, surely each commercial has a different impact on the subconscious down the road, long after the final whistle of Super Sunday.

For what it's worth, I think the NFL's Evolution ad was among the most memorable, uptempo, nostalgic, colorful, creative and certainly appealing for traditional football fans. This was a full blown scrimmage, after all, and deserved ads with equitable ingenuity; sexualized chocolate and high-IQ dogs won't stick in my mind, I'm afraid.