Sometimes the solution needed to fix a franchise and save a season is just too difficult and complicated to ever sort out. And sometimes a pear-shaped guy using a silly nickname and Norwegian subtitles to sell razors on the other side of the globe flashes the answer right across your Twitter feed.
Yesterday, I sat down to tackle the bizarre and potentially ruinous kicking situation in Detroit. Here it is: So far this season, in a league of unparalleled parity where typically half of all games are decided by a touchdown or less, the Lions' growing collection of kicking castoffs (Nate Freese, Alex Henery and, for the time being, Matt Prater) are 5-for-15 (33.3 percent) on field goals. This includes a combined effort of 0-for-2014 on seven kicks of between 40 and 49 yards.
How bad is this? I'm twice as good as the Lions kickers. And so are you.
The first thing you should know is that this whole mess started after 2012 when Jason Hanson, who, God love him, had been with the Lions for 21 seasons, decided to retire at 42 rather than take the team's lowball offer of the league minimum and a million-dollar bonus. (And good for him. I mean, Hanson deserved at least 10 times that in hazard pay just for surviving two decades in Detroit. And as far as his age: Hello? Nine of the top 10 kickers in NFL history played well into their 40s, including the No. 1 kicker of all time Morten Andersen, who was 47 when he finally retired.)
Anyway, after they were done insulting Hanson, in 2013 the Detroit brain trust went with David Akers, who missed five field goals and converted the second fewest kicks in the NFL (19) as the Lions suffered their 12th losing season in the last 13 years. This summer Akers was replaced by seventh-round pick Freese, who got the boot after going 3-for-7 in three games. Next was Henery, who lasted all of two weeks before getting fired after botching three kicks (indoors) in a 17-14 loss to the Bills -- a blown opportunity any Lions fan worth his, or her, salt knows damn well is going to come back to haunt the team in December when the playoff race tightens up in the competitive NFC North.
A week ago, Detroit's kicking woes had gotten so bad the Lions were forced to turn to Prater, a 2013 Pro Bowler cut loose by Denver who had just finished a stint in a Florida rehab facility while serving a four-game suspension for violating the NFL's policy on substance abuse. I'm rooting for Prater -- as a kicker and a person. But the bottom line is, the Lions just placed the fate of their entire season at the feet of a player who, with one more drink, could be suspended for an entire year. (If you follow this franchise at all, you know that this is absolutely, 100 percent, the most Lions things ever.) Prater, of course, pulled on his Honolulu blue jersey last week and promptly shanked two kicks against the Vikings, double his miss total from a year ago.
After a brief but gut-wrenching childhood flashback of the sure-footed Eddie Murray pushing a game-winning field goal wide against the 49ers in the 1983 NFC divisional playoffs, I sat at my desk, staring at a bowl full of Petoskey stones from the shores of Lake Michigan, trying to make sense of it all.
How can you reconcile it, though? There's now a very real possibility that a guy who benches 150 pounds or so and wears Halloween-costume shoulder pads, could, with a few yips of his soccer cleat or one sip of Stroh's, unravel all the hard work of the NFL's best and nastiest defense, Megatron's once-in-a-generation talent and what has to be the Lions' best chance in the last 57 years to snag that elusive second playoff victory.
So I wracked my brain for a solution. Think, Flem. Think. Pooch punts? Tracking down a 54-year-old Morten Andersen? Or, better yet, where's Ali Haji-Sheikh? (At the very least, we would all get to say the name Ali Haji-Sheikh over and over.) How about Ndamukong Suh, doesn't he have a soccer background? Maybe that's all he needs as a way to channel his occasionally rambunctious cleats? Or, what about just going for it on every fourth down? I mean, the NFL-wide conversion rate in 2013 was around 48 percent. I'm no math whiz, but that beats the Lions' 33.3 percent conversion rate on field goals, right?
And then, at that very moment -- I swear to God, Ernie Harwell, Bob Seger and all that is good and holy in Motown -- my Twitter feed lit up with the one word that I instantly knew would save the Lions' season. (To say nothing of my column.)
Kickalicious.
Havard "Kickalicious" Rugland.
He's the Norwegian Internet sensation who spent the 2013 preseason in Detroit after a few NFL teams discovered him on YouTube, where his trick-kicking video now has more than 5.5 million views.
Call it fate. Call it kismet. Or, ya know, call it the multimillion-dollar marketing campaign of a worldwide razor conglomerate. But yesterday, while putting this column together, trying to invent solutions to solve the Lions' Whiffalicious kicking game, what did I see but a message from Gillette directing me to an ad for the company's Precision products line featuring a video from Rugland. This, of course, led me to re-watch a few of Kickalicious' mind-blowing homemade kicking vids -- the kind that are so otherworldly good you start to look for photoshopping and video doctoring because, after watching the Lions kick for five weeks, your brain simply can't imagine that someone could actually do it this well.
Even under the most ideal setting, the Lions continue to struggle to get a single kick, from any distance, to lurch, sputter, flop and flutter through the uprights. Meanwhile, here's Kickalicious, a guy the team once had under contract, nonchalantly blasting 60-yard field goals off sand dunes and across canals and then, for good measure, sweeping the football 50 yards off a boat dock and into the arms of a guy floating by IN A GOSHDANG CANOE.
It's easy for self-important football people to dismiss Rugland as a YouTube gimmick, as the Justin Bieber of placekicking. I mean, it's like thinking you might find a future NFL MVP quarterback stocking shelves in a grocery store. But during his tryout with the Lions last preseason, Rugland was a camp sensation and a perfect 3-for-3 on preseason field goal attempts. He hit from 50 and 49 yards, did well on all six of his kickoffs and made an impression with his infectious attitude -- something the Lions' locker room seems to be perpetually short on. After one of his field goals, Rugland ran off the field, leapt into the arms of linebacker Stephen Tulloch and celebrated like the Lions had just won the Super Bowl. "It's refreshing to see how much fun he's having," quarterback Matthew Stafford said at the time. "The guy is having a blast here and he's doing a great job. He's kicking the ball great."
After struggling a bit in his final week of camp, Rugland was sent packing, all the way back to Norway, where he waits to this day. He's so desperate for football, in fact, he even attended NFL games in London. Hasn't he suffered enough? When Akers struggled last year the Lions thought a few times about re-signing Rugland. But I got the feeling former Lions coach and current Buffalo defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz wasn't that fond of Kickalicious or his nontraditional path to the pros. "I don't know," Schwartz said at the time. "We're not out here having a county fair, circus or paying a dollar and having a shot at doing something."
Ironic, isn't it, that the jerk who almost fought Jim Harbaugh over a handshake and who recently had his Buffalo players carry him off the field after a mediocre performance in Detroit would be worried about turning the game into a circus?
What's the whole point of being a hapless franchise like the Lions if you can't use it to your advantage once in a while? I mean, could re-signing a Norwegian Internet sensation to be your kicker really be any more embarrassing than, say, losing to the Bills at home or shanking two out of every three of your field goal attempts? Could giving Rugland another shot be more embarrassing than, say, a guy blowing out his knee celebrating a sack, a wideout wrecking his car and his arm while saving a takeout pizza or a lineman getting into an altercation with a marching band at halftime?
So join me, before it's too late, in demanding that the Lions re-sign Havard Rugland, transform their kicking game from Yipalicious to Kickalicious and, finally, once and for all:
Gjenopprette brølet!