Ah, kickers: Will they ever stop amusing us?
The latest to put his million-dollar foot in his mouth, courtesy of CSNWashington.com, is the Washington Redskins' Neil Rackers, late of the Houston Texans, and before that the Arizona Cardinals, and even before that, the Cincinnati Bengals.
Rackers has been in the NFL a long time, so he should know better, but while talking with reporters Friday, he characterized his decision to come to Washington this way:
"I like the idea of NFC East football. It's real football."
Let's digest this for a moment. A man whose only known contact in 13 NFL seasons has been the repeated collisions between his right shoe and a football has decided that the four teams of the AFC South don't play "real football"? And since he'd bounced around the NFL so much, we can't even be sure Rackers wasn't slighting a couple other divisions as well.
In his defense, Rackers was trying to talk up his new Washington Redskins teammates.
"I think it's a team that's got an opportunity to do some special things," he said. "I've been on two teams that no one assumed would do anything -- the Texans and Cardinals. The Texans went to the playoffs for the first time and the Cardinals made it to the Super Bowl. I see a lot of similarities between the Redskins and those teams."
Rackers, 35, also blamed his departure from the Texans on miscommunication between his former agent and the team during contract negotiations.
"They threw out a number evidently, and my agent threw out an astronomical number, so they just decided, 'Hey, we're going to go in another direction,' " he said. "That's business."
Sounds like Rackers needs to get a "real" agent.
