Man, what a week. I can’t imagine what the Bills fans are going through. Six turnovers and their offense still can’t do a damn thing. If the Cowboys perform like that next week it’ll be 25-70 instead of 25-24.
So what do you guys think about this “Icing the kicker” nonsense that’s catching on this season? For the unitiated, that’s waiting until the last possible second to call a timeout when the opposing kicker is lining up for a big attempt. Personally, I think it’s cheap and I hope the league addresses it in the offseason. At least a few commentators I’ve heard tonight are already promising it’ll be prohibited in the rules next year.
It seems to me that icing the kicker used to be viewed as generally honorable, and practically obligatory if you were the defending team with a timeout burning a hole in your pocket. A little irritating? Sure, but mainly because no one felt like having to sit and wait for the big finish, not because it was a violation of some unwritten rule. I’m wondering what happened to change perceptions.
Well, icing the kicker by making him sit and wait for a while longer before kicking is one thing- essentially asking the kicker to make the field goal twice by calling atimeout right before the snap- well it smells bad. It is not against the rules, but it doesn’t seem sportsmanlike to me. I imagine there will be some kind of rule about calling it from the sidelines in the next round of voting.
Folk kind of turned the tactic around tonight, though. His career best, 53 yards, and he made it twice dead center with room to spare. What a great game. Talk about ice cold.
As for icing the kicker. I don’t think that the coach should be able to call I time out. That is a players job. I think is it kinda lame for a coach to be able to do it on the sidelines while all the players are concentrating.
Fight a furinner’s ignorance here…why should “icing the kicker” be prohibited? All it does is delay the kick, doesn’t it? You mean it breaks the kicker’s concentration? That’s it? Eh.
What would have been great is if Folk missed the field goal then got a second chance and made it.
That will happen someday.
Ice the kicker my ass. That was some impressive kicking tonight. four field goals two of them (kinda a third) his records and an onside kick.
The Dallas defense was great. To overcome all those interceptions and only allow the Billls 3 offensive points is amazing. What a crazy game.
While I personally find the tactic to be irritating, everyone seems to take for granted that it favors the defending team, and I can’t quite figure it out.
People say “it makes you make the kick twice”, but that’s not true. You have to do it once, the second time. What about the times that a kicker misses the first, invalid attempt, and then makes the second one?
The only advantage is psychological, if you put pressure on the kicker. But it seems to me like it should actually be an advantage… the kicker gets a practice kick so that the next kick can be better.
Icing the kicker has been around as long as teams have that last time-out to burn. But this is the third time this season where the teams have lined up, the ball gets snapped and the kicker lets fly and then the refs state that the opposing team had called time.
The refs have to blow that play dead before the center snaps the ball and if the coach says: “I want time called when the play clock reaches: 02,” then why don’t the refs relay that information to the teams on the field?
They do, actually. From a post of mine about this in the Pit: On these last-second icing timeouts, the way it works is this: the coach, on the sideline, is standing next to the line judge and lets him know that he’s going to call a timeout at the last second. At the appropriate moment (about a second or two before the ball figures to be snapped), the coach request the timeout. The line judge then grants the timeout in the usual way, but he’s far away from all the players (and, significantly, the network’s sound pickups), and there are 70,000 screaming fans, so this tends to go unnoticed for a few seconds.
As for the practice in general, I think it’s annoying, and the league should fix it in the offseason. Not by taking away the coach’s ability to call a timeout (no good reason for that other than this problem), but just by making it illegal for the defense to call a timeout on a FG attempt once the kicking team is set. You can still ice the kicker, you just can’t trick everyone into going through a charade.
That said, so long as it’s legal, it’s not a jerk move. In fact, if the coach honestly believes it gives his team the best chance to win, he’s morally obligated to do it.
What might get lost in Romo’s massive aura of suckitude last night was the dropsy nature of TO. He’s had problems with it before. There were several balls he should have had last night, including the challenge at the end, the “not pushed out of bounds” play, and the two point conversion.
Yes, as others have said, there was the old icing the kicker. When only players could call timeout, this didn’t happen.
This Jauron thing (and Shananhan, and Kiffin, and Cowher (who did it against the Falcons one game last year), and others) is designed solely to make him kick it twice. It’s done to exploit a technicality. It’s not “strategic”. Jaws makes it sound like its part of the intellectual skills of coaching a football game. Jesus, a two year old could figure it out. I think it’s a bitch move.
I would just make it so that once the offense is set, only players can call time outs, at all times. The coach can make a strategic time out call to ice the kicker or adjust his personnel, but not interrupt the on field action.
I wouldn’t make it illegal for the defense to call a time out, they might notice the FG team is actually set up for a fake FG, or they don’t have the right number of players. There are good reasons to take a last second time out, besides icing, just make someone on the field do it.
This is distinct from what everyone used to call “icing the kicker”.
That used to be a time out called well before the snap so that the kicker was further removed from his warm up, and supposedly to make him “think about it”. That never worked.
This, however, is a deliberate attempt to allow a snap to happen by exploit the non-instantaneous speed of communication from the sideline official, and the officials in the action.
I don’t know what you’d call it, “perturbing the kicker” or something, but it’s not “icing the kicker”.
It was only made possible once the coach was allowed to call timeouts, a rule instituted only within the last couple of years.
It worked in Denver this year. It worked the following week in Oakland. It worked for Pittsburgh against Atlanta one year. It didn’t work last night.
Bizarrely, the Bill’s O seemed like it was functioning pretty well. The line was creating some huge holes, Edwards was impressive as all get out (especially for a rook) and Lynch was running like a man afire. I’m still trying to figure out how their O ended with just 3.
One upside for the Bills… I think they’ve found their QB of the future.
They did SEEM good to me, too. But, they only wound up with 148 yards passing, and 81 rushing.
And, despite the fact that there were 3 returns for TDs (meaning that the Dallas offense is on the field for consecutive drives multiple times), the Bills STILL controlled time of possession 32:30-28:30.
They did have one drive of almost 9 minutes, though, and Dallas had a couple “drives” that were really only one play. (one might have been a couple plays).
I think it’s a cheap stunt and shows what copycats coaches are. I have an easy solution: coaches may call timeout from the sidelines except for field goal attempts. If they want to ice the kicker the old fashioned way, then one of the players on the field needs to call it and that would be well before the snap.
Last year’s game between the Bears and Pats should have put a stop to this nonsense. Gostkowski, a rookie, is lined up to kick a 52-yarder… and the Pats tried to ice him as discussed above (the double-try definition of “icing”). Only he’d already kicked (and missed) the attempt. So he lines up again and nails it on the second try. I’m amazed that he didn’t cross the field and thank the Pats’ coach for the gift.
