Based on his recent guest spot on The Rich Eisen Show, comedy icon Larry David wants the NFL to make a major change in how the game works. He doesn’t even get how kickers and goalposts are still in the game.
Eisen started the discussion about football by asking David what he would do differently if he had Roger Goodell‘s position.
“I really don’t care if people like it or not, I’m losing the goalposts,” said the Curb Your Enthusiasm star. “Why are there goalposts? Why are kickers–they don’t have football skills…they’re not football players but I’m sure they’re wonderful people–why are they kicking the ball through goal posts to decide games?”
You can watch the segment in the video above and even as David is precisely the guy you might know from Curb or even Jason Alexander’s portrayal of George Costanza, the Seinfeld character based on him, he’s also making a pretty, pretty good point.
David isn’t done with kicking footballs, either–he goes on to say later in the segment that he’d also consider getting rid of punters. As far as he’s concerned, the way to score extra points is entirely through 1-2 point conversions.
The fun thing about the video is how many logical points the comedy writer makes. He also hates the coin toss at the beginning of the game and thinks the NFL’s overtime rules are ridiculous, in general.
These ideas aren’t unique to Larry David. In 2019 Sports Illustrated published an article by writer Kalyn Kahler that stated kickers are no longer a relevant part of the game. Here’s more from SI:
I know that kicking is not easy. It’s really, really hard. A Chicago brewery challenged Bears fans to attempt Parkey’s 43-yard field goal—without timing it to the snap or worrying about a defensive line of leaping giants—and not a single fan of the 100 who tried even came close. (Including me.)
The job is so specific and repetitive that it’s hardly even the kicker’s fault that they sometimes get the yips and miss an extra point, or as in otherwise solid Packers kicker Mason Crosby’s case last year: FOUR missed field goals and a missed extra point in one game. Their job is specialized to a fault. They don’t have to learn three different responsibilities on the same play or adapt their game plan each week for a different opponent. All they do is repeat the exact same task: Three steps back, two steps to the left, approach and kick.
Kaler went on to point out how the presence of kickers might not be great for teams as a whole, using the example “an offensive lineman, out there battling defensive linemen chest-to-chest, expending every ounce of your energy to win your matchups.” If the kicker, Kaler writes, “who has yet to break a sweat, goes out and misses an extra point. How can you not just hate that kicker?”
NFL kickers aren’t going anywhere soon, but it would be pretty funny if once the NFL commissioner announced they were being pulled from the game, a band began playing the infamous Curb Your Enthusiasm tuba music.