Cowboys’ Brett Maher became national punchline. Former Giant Jay Feely knows the joke.
Maher #Maher
Technically speaking, nobody has ever had a game like Brett Maher had on Monday night. Four missed extra points. An NFL single-game record for futility in a skill as close to automatic as they come in sports. NFL teams were successful on 94.6 percent of their PAT attempts in 2022.
It was the kind of night that makes somebody’s name an unfortunate national punchline.
On this, Jay Feely can, well, feel him.
Feely, who spent 14 years kicking in the NFL, once found himself the subject of a Saturday Night Live skit after missing three game-winning field goal attempts for the New York Giants in a 2005 game at Seattle. If the game wasn’t bad enough, Feely had to endure Dane Cook playing him in a five-minute mockumentary called “The Long Ride Home,” in which Feely has to land the Giants’ charter – between a pair of radio towers – after the pilot passes out. Spoiler alert: We never said the punchline was funny. He lands the plane, then skids off the runway.
But Feely said Tuesday, that experience paved the way for better success for him. And, he said, the Cowboys should consider that as they forge ahead with Maher as kicker.
“How you handle the week after, that may define your year, maybe even your career,” said Feely, now an NFL analyst for CBS. “The next week was the hardest of my life. You don’t want to talk to anybody. You don’t want to see anything. You just want to get to the next game. When it doesn’t break you, it clears up such a path for you. It just allows you to play freer. It did me. I was a much better kicker after that than I was the five years before.”
What we are talking about here are the “yips,” a phrase coined nearly 100 years ago by a Scottish golfer after inexplicably losing his ability to putt. The term has since found its way into the Mayo Clinic’s dictionary of medical diseases and conditions.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the condition isn’t necessarily all mental, but rather defined as “involuntary wrist spasms.”
“It was once thought that the yips were always associated with performance anxiety,” the dictionary says. “However, it now appears that some people have the yips due to a neurological condition affecting specific muscles [focal dystonia].”
It says nothing about feet or ankles, though it stands to reason that if you make a living that way, involuntary spasms could affect those joints, too.
We don’t really know, though. The first rule of the yips in baseball is usually to not talk about them. In baseball clubhouses, mentioning the word can nearly get one chased out. Golfers are little more willing to discuss it.
Golfer Tommy Armour, the Scotsman of the early 20th century, is credited with coining the phrase in the 1920s after losing his feel for putting. Presumably, it happened sometime after he scored a 23 – an Archaeopteryx, for the sharp-toothed, magpie-sized flying dinosaur – on a par 5 at the Shawnee Open in 1927. It struck quickly. Only a week earlier, he’d won the U.S. Open. Armour struggled off and on with the issue for the rest of his career but did bounce back well enough to later win a PGA Championship and a British open.
Other golfers have struggled with it too. Perhaps the most recent notable case was David Duval, who fell from No. 1 in the world to No. 211 in the matter of two years and never recovered.
In baseball, it was first called “Steve Blass Disease” for the Pittsburgh pitcher who suddenly lost the ability to throw strikes and went from 1971 World Series hero to out of baseball in three years. But it can affect other parts of the game. Infielders Steve Sax and Chuck Knoblauch struggled with simple throws to first. Catchers Mackey Sasser and former Ranger Jarrod Saltalamacchia developed issues with throws to second. Pitcher Jon Lester had no issues with throwing to hitters but clenched up on throws to first base.
Football? In football, guys usually don’t get chances to recover before being waived. Even Troy Aikman, on ESPN’s broadcast mentioned that as a possibility Monday night.”
On Tuesday, Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy once again said the club planned to forge ahead with Maher. He did not explicitly mention the yips, but special teams coach John Fassel did acknowledge the problem by name while saying he remained confident Maher could have a strong performance Sunday against San Francisco. Maher hit 50 of 53 attempts during the regular season and ranked eighth in the league in field goal percentage (90.6%) on 32 tries.
“The guy had a phenomenal year,” Feely said. “He had a bad game. It’s like Dak said, ‘I played a sh—y game last week and came back.’ The challenge is to not let it linger.”
OK, but how do you that in a world where social media rules. Maher is not active on Twitter, the last post on his account is three years old. Still, on Monday night, somebody sought it out to tell him he was going to be “shipped to Guantanamo Bay.” Twitter is often like Dane Cook: Not particularly funny.
But even Feely tweeted a meme from Rocky IV urging the Cowboys to “throw the damn towel” on Maher’s night. On ESPN’s Manningcast, Peyton Manning asked if a kicker could be cut at halftime. On the same broadcast, Colorado coach Deion Sanders, made a quick comment about kickers having one job. By the way, Sanders’ kicker in 2023: Jace Feely, son of Jay, who is transferring from Arizona State.
Feely’s version went this way: The SNL skit aired six days after his field goal fiasco. The next week, he hit a 27-yarder against the Cowboys, but missed a 33-yarder in the Giants 17-10 win. And the week after, the Giants played at Philadelphia. Every time he stepped on the field, he was greeted with a montage of his misses. His response: He went 4-for-4, including the game-winner.
“If I had a chance, I’d show him the SNL skit and tell him it was the best thing to happen to me,” Feely said. “There is nothing you can say to make him feel better right now. But [that game] allowed me to focus on the process more rather than the result. And what was happening on Monday is he started focusing on the result. When you start thinking: ‘I can’t miss another,’ you are done.”
Feely found his way back.
Maybe Maher can, too.
Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant
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