NFL kicks off season.

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Heres an article to get ready with...
Good luck to all.

Everyone is on their toes, ready for kickoff

Thursday, September 07, 2006
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Soon after 8:30 tonight, at the tangible close of a seemingly interminable offseason, a seemingly intractable preseason, and a seemingly endless pregame show, someone will hand a football to a kicker at the 30-yard line, and that kicker will put his hands on that particular football for the first time.

This is how you know the box has been opened on a new season, both literally and metaphorically, for lest anyone forget how seriously this National Football League takes itself in the era of its unparalleled corporate success, here's a sampling of the protocols involved just in the presentation of the first inflated pig bladder to either the Steelers' Jeff Reed or Olindo Mare of the Miami Dolphins tonight.

The Steelers, as the home team, are required to have 36 footballs available (indoor teams can get away with 24), and while you'd think 36 footballs would be sufficient in a sport that insists only one appear on the field at any given time, that's just the beginning.

I quote you now from page 770 of the 2006 NFL Record & Fact Book, under BALL.

Twelve (12) new footballs, sealed in a special box and shipped by the manufacturer, will be opened in the officials' locker room two hours prior to the starting time of the game. These balls are to be specially marked with the letter "k" and used exclusively for the kicking game.

"We don't see those 'k' balls until they hand one to us on the field," Reed said just as the Steelers finished preparation for this super-heated opener. "They ship 'em in late, sometimes I think they don't get here until 30 minutes before the game.

"But as soon as I touch it, I can tell right away what kind of ball it is."

A football?

Technically, but not all footballs are created equal. What Reed knows right away is whether the one in his hands is a rock or a rocket. Some seem to resist flight every second they're airborne, like that fidgety guy on the red-eye from San Diego, others reach a comfortable cruising altitude and eventually roll comfortably to a gate at the back of the end zone.

The kind of Steelers season that comes out of the box tonight has similar parameters. When you start the autumn with your celebrated gunslinger on the sideline, as these Steelers do with Ben Roethlisberger, the immediate future can feel about as inviting as an emergency appendectomy. At the same reflective moment, when you have the admirable number of proven winners that populate this Pittsburgh roster, no altitude seems unreachable.

One of those would, of course, be Reed, who not only made all 45 of his extra-point attempts last fall, but also all 20 of his field-goal tries inside the 40. He made 24 of 29 field-goal attempts in all, including game-winners against San Diego and Baltimore. In the historical postseason, he attempted 14 PATs and three field goals, and nailed every single kick.

At 27, he already knows everything about what it takes to kick under pressure, but he doesn't know why there's so much last-minute security over such apparent minutia as the presentation of the new football, or that anyone does.

"Maybe a long time ago kickers were allowed to bring their own ball," Reed said. "I'm not saying they tried to cheat, but something must have happened."

So what's the first thing Reed or Mare will do when they're invited to handle the inaugural ball tonight? Why, they'll try to alter it, of course.

"You try to smash the ends in," Reed explained. "See if you can get it to inflate more. It's probably more of a confidence thing than anything else."

You've seen it. The kicker will take the ball from the official, put his palms against the tapering ends of the bladder and smash them toward each other. The theory appears to be that by forcing the air inside the ball toward the middle belly, its flight, once booted, will be augmented once it's booted. I'm not looking it up, but the technical term for this is probably something like aeronautical nonsense.

The ball's out of the box. It's been rubbed by the equipment guys and been tested and approved by the referee with his trusty NFL-approved pressure gauge. For better or worse, it represents a new season unwrapped.

Now let's just kick it and see what happens.
(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette or 412-263-1283.