New rule this year about the K-balls. Teams now get to break them in all week, they get a new set on Mondays. Used to be they got 'em right out of the box 90 minutes before game time and could barely break them in. Now each ball gets seasoned just right by the equipment managers and then used for 100+ practice kicks before Sunday.
Yep. I always do this, but with humility because it didn't stick regardless, so it’s actually even a bit embarrassing more than anything. I kicked in college for an NCAA D1-AA (FCS) university for a bit. The practice balls are so beat up that you can bang monstrous field goals if you allow yourself or the team to break the balls in; or if they give Special Teams the used ones because it costs a bunch of money to have guys kicking new footballs that the QB is supposed to take reps and practice with, so they let the QB have the nice ones and the kickers get those k balls and they're recycled around. Anyway, during tryouts I kicked a sixty-yard field goal to my own surprise and amazement. Yeah, that sounds crazy, but it isn't. Trust me. If you played soccer at any sort of reasonably good level—and again humility, but I played soccer in high school and we were excellent, but frankly I . . . well, I started, but if we're gonna be a buck, I was ***. But I can kick a ball quite naturally and far enough, and so it was. If you seriously doubt me, check the kid on the Pat McAfee show from Vanderbilt who just won a bunch of money recently by kicking a field goal on campus—only don’t check the shenanigans in the celebration, and forget about the money—look at how he killed the ball. It was a damn moonshot, and I don't think he was a kicker.
So I had gone to boarding school to play hockey as a post-graduate (it's a Northeast thing) after my soccer-playing days in high school were done, and I can tell you that's when I learned the difference between practice balls and game balls, or they were different back then, but the game balls weren't bricks like the stories would have you believe. In fact, they were leather and fully pumped-up, but nothing absurd because quarterbacks have to grip the darn thing and throw it once every ten or so running plays, and as a kicker, you were good to go for the most part. I didn't get much of a chance to attempt many field goals that year because we were a decent-sized boarding school, and there wasn't a dedicated long snapper there. Everybody doubled up, and so we lost our first long snapper in our first game to injury, and the other guy who could do it was a TE who got blood clots after our third game and wound up out for the year, so we were sort of a mish-mash specialist operation and we gutted it out all year with a third guy snapping and some weird results.
The weirdest (well, the worst) was when we lost a game 13-12 even though we scored two touchdowns because our first XP snap went (WHOA!) over my head and my new buddy, the QB’s head also. I ran back and grabbed the ball and proceeded to roll out and heave it, but alas, it sailed on me a bit, and worse, some charging defensive lineman had leveled me hit-'em-up style, sending me into my momentum and face first onto the field as my throw actually got to the end zone and to a guy that had broken from TE, or the edge, or whatever it was called, only he was out of bounds and had bobbled it in addition to his unfortunate location. So we lost that game and we’re all in an all-school assembly on Thursday, and they read the score out loud to everybody because they’re recapping athletic accomplishments the prior day, and they say the score and then something about the two touchdowns, and they think they're doing a good thing by praising the effort and the guys who scored while I'm like, "WTF?!!! We had a bad snap on one and went for two to win it on the next one, and you're selling me out in front of C__ model agency's own D___ A____ sitting right next to me here, who now is mentally taking goalpost notes (or so I imagined) and making calculations in her head, and so she must think I can't kick a freaking ball twenty yards in the air and WHAT IN THE GOD FORSAKEN PURGATORY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI IS THIS ISH!"
So anyway, I got my PG certificate and went to university and those practice balls I mentioned, if you kick them enough, eventually soften to a butter-like leather, and this school I was attending was one that belonged to a conference that had no scholarships (one of the two I-AA or FCS conferences that did this ca. 1992), but financial aid
is tied to your sport if you do have that going on, so I'm nailing the aforementioned sixty-yarder in tryouts, and I look at the other kickers naively thinking they'll be happy or impressed I can do this, and they give me a collective grunt and just ignore me entirely, and I was like, “Ohhh, I dig,” but our kicking room, despite the constant uproarious encouragement, laughter, and positivity was not good at all that year in terms of kicking the football between the goalposts, so I made the team and stayed for like a month and a half until I realized that everybody (including he kickers) hated kickers no matter what; and I missed both home and hockey, and since the hockey was Division I and I wasn't going to walk-on at my school (it's not merit-based at all places because of that financial aid system and the promises made and depended upon, and I would have been pretty damn marginal regardless, but the 3rd and 4th lines weren't exactly awesome, I have to say). So instead I joined the club team, and once I decided to do that I just up and left the football team and that was that for me and my foray into playing the sport.
But yeah, you can hit a field goal from some serious distance if you get those kicking balls right.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
