Few stories are more fun than those involving kickers that go off the rails. Hey, it’s a tough gig, right? The NFL is a make-or-miss league for the clutch leg swingers, and usually, we hear from them when they miss the big kicks as they mumble, “Dang, I really let the team down” into their kicking tees.
God bless Harrison Butker, though. Really. This truly misguided dude thinks he’s important enough to produce knucklehead quotes about his religion, so he justified that with his platform and the fact that people supposedly “want me to state what I believe to be very important.”
What’s “important” and what really matters
Let’s review. Butker first started digging this verbal hole back in May when he gave a commencement speech at tiny Benedictine College, which apparently has a slightly different flavor of Catholicism in which women are eternally cast in the role of homemakers.
What’s that? You hear a lot of women protesting? Women who are fighting for equal pay in the workplace and women across the country fighting to keep their reproductive rights?
Yeah, them. There’s a ton of them, but apparently, they don’t matter in the tiny, narrow world that exists in Harrison Butker’s mind. What matters is what he says about them, because evidently that’s more important.
The conversations that followed
For better or worse, Harrison Butker isn’t a political leader. He isn’t a human rights activist. Nor is he especially high up in the world of local Catholics, not from what we could tell.
Nope. He’s a kicker. That’s right, he boots an inflated piece of what used to be leather once a week for the Kansas City Chiefs, then hopes it will go high and far enough to put a point or three on the board for his team.
But that’s important, right? The kicker here is that it’s important for Butker to go forward and tell thousands and millions of women what to do, not to mention how to live their lives. Butker claims that several “deep” conversations followed with his teammates, so let’s look at how some of those might have gone.
Start with Andy Reid. Calls about what Butker said are Reid’s worst nightmares, and Reid was probably dreaming about his next cheeseburger and his preseason play sheet when he got the call about Butker’s comments.
Reid’s conversation probably started with something like, “You’re the kicker, for heaven’s sake. What the eff were you thinking?”
The Kansas City coach wasn’t the only one with that thought, though. Who knows how many teammates were thinking the same thing? They then asked “deep” questions about why they were being asked to comment about this nonsense when they’re supposed to be focused on winning a third championship.
The goal here wasn’t a field goal, exactly
All of which makes us wonder what the play here was. Butker is already well paid. He makes an average annual salary of $6.4M, and he’ll pull down about $4M this year. Presumably, he’s happily married with kids, and hopefully, his wife doesn’t have him sleeping on the couch for spewing this knucklehead nonsense.
So the play has to be for the future. How is Harrison Butker going to make that kind of money when he’s retired? What will he do to feed his poor, aggrieved self and his happily domesticated family?
Now think about kickers gone bonkers. What’s the ultimate version of that, and what does it look like? That’s easy. His name is Pat McAfee, and he’s a former punter who signed deals for $120M with FanDuel and another $120M with ESPN.
The punter got this kind of long coin based on the by-value of saying stupid things. Say something dumb enough, and folks will watch your podcast. Say something dumber, and Aaron Rodgers will come on your podcast and try to outwit you. Say something even dumber, and ESPN and FanDuel will come calling.
Presumably, there’s someone somewhere in Harrison Butker’s world who’s willing to nudge him into that world when his playing days are over. There’s no shortage of narrow-minded fools in the world, especially famous ones, so look for Butker to join them when he turns to making a living by putting his foot in his mouth rather than using it to kick footballs.
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