Of all the forms of howling outrage Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker has unleashed by sticking up for traditional Christian family values, I’ll give Peter Hamm this much: At least his howling outrage was novel.
Hamm is one of the many offering Very Serious Opinions™ on Butker’s viral commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas earlier this month, all of which seem to revolve around what the appropriate punishment should be for a Catholic sharing his views of his Catholic faith with graduates at a Catholic school.
Most of these opinions have involved Butker being cut or “dismissed” from the team. Some have used more novel forms of punishment — such as whoever was behind the official account for the city of Kansas City, which doxed Butker over his remarks.
Hamm, a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who authored a guest opinion meltdown in the Kansas City Star, is among the former contingent, so that part isn’t quite the novelty. The headline, however, argues for a different form of atonement for the team that currently employs him: “The KC Chiefs should fire Harrison Butker and hire someone who kicks like a girl.”
Well, not just “like a girl” — someone who is a girl.
This, Hamm wrote in the Friday piece, would be “poetic justice after Harrison Butker’s Neanderthal outburst” — and he insists “the pipeline of talent is real.”
“This is not a joke. It’s not unrealistic. And it would be good for business. Just ask the University of Manitoba how ticket sales were last year,” he wrote.
“Not a joke” depends on your definition of what a “joke” is at the NFL level. Mr. Hamm is referring to the fact that kicker Maya Turner started for the University of Manitoba Bisons, becoming “the first woman to play and score in a regular-season U Sports football game,” according to UM Today, the university’s news website.
Manitoba, for those of you who are geographically challenged, is in Canada — a country that produces some excellent hockey players and curlers, but where the level of gridiron football talent is rather, um, insignificant compared to that which exists in the United States, especially at the upper echelons of the NCAA pyramid.
Do you stand with Harrison Butker?
Indeed, Turner is from Minnesota; the fact she’s playing for a team north of the border should tell you how ready she is for that kind of competition. Hamm is impressed that she hit a 48-yard field goal, which is certainly laudable, but nothing to crow about at the top levels of the sport.
“You give me 55 Maya Turners, and I’ll give you a championship at whatever sport you’re on,” one of her coaches said, according to Hamm.
Yes, but… that coach is currently at the University of Manitoba, it’s worth reiterating, and not in the NFL — where the prevailing wisdom is that muscular 300-lb. linemen are best suited to protect 6’5″ quarterbacks who can launch the ball 70 yards in the air and hit — in perfect stride — a wide receiver who can run a 4.4-second 40-yard dash in perfect stride.
These are talents which — even if women were administered a daily cocktail of PEDs that would make Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds and the old East German women’s swim team go googly-eyed in horror — would continue to exclusively belong to those with Y chromosomes.
But Hamm is talking about kicking. And there’s Sarah Fuller, who kicked for Vanderbilt University. That’s a team in the Southeastern Conference, an NCAA “Power Five” school. Surely that’s a sign that women are ready for prime-time as kickers in football, right?
If you’re unfamiliar with college football, that’s a no — in italics.
The Vanderbilt Commodores are to SEC football what the Washington Generals are to the Harlem Globetrotters, a convenient punching (or kicking, if you like) bag that’s always good for an easy W.
As Sports Illustrated noted weakly when it tried to put lipstick on Fuller’s time with the squad, the soccer “goalkeeper-turned-placekicker didn’t turn around the winless Vanderbilt football team. But she did have a great effect on those tuning in to watch history be made.”
The key word in that puffery is “winless.”
Watching history be made might be OK at Vanderbilt, a prestigious school where students are reported to enjoy chanting “That’s all right / That’s OK / You’ll all work for us someday!” to opposing teams’ fans as the Commodores drop another one to a school with a serious football program.
NFL fans tune in to watch winning teams. The Chiefs are an elite professional squad that has won three and appeared in four of the last five Super Bowls. Butker kicked for Georgia Tech, a school of somewhat better gridiron provenance.
You do the math. (Or maybe get a Vanderbilt student to do it for you. I hear they’re awfully good at it, lousy though their football team may be.)
But wait, there’s more, not really! Quoth Hamm: “There are more than 300 players on the 14 teams in the National Women’s Soccer League. That’s more than 300 women who are professional ball kickers and don’t currently choose to be stay-at-home housewives.”
Yes, because kicking a ball in different sports is totally interchangeable. They don’t even have to be the same shape, so sayeth Mr. Hamm! Come the heck on:
This is space year 2024, exactly 60 years after Pete Gogolak became the first professional soccer-style kicker in the pros for the Buffalo Bills. Today, all NFL kickers are soccer-style, and so are almost all at the top level of NCAA football. Almost none are women. Thanks for the attempt, though.
But it’s not that women can actually do the job that Butker does, which Hamm acknowledges: ” The Chiefs need to make a strategic call about Butker’s future with the team. If he could agree to shut his mouth, the current story might fade,” he wrote.
“There are, after all, plenty of athletes with backward cultural views, but they’re tolerated if they can mostly stick to sports cliches in interviews. If they’re superstars, they sometimes can keep yapping and get away with it. Harrison Butker is not Patrick Mahomes. He’s a special teams player. That gives him less leverage with the team. They could trade him for a solid kicker, or they could make a statement by signing a woman to kick.” [Emphasis ours.]
And there you have it: It has nothing to do with whether or not a kicker is good. And make no mistake, Butker is good.
According to Pro Football Reference, he hit on over 94 percent of his field goals last season, including being 12-for-12 of kicks of over 40 yards and 5-for-5 on those over 50 yards. No, it’s that Mr. Hamm wants to see Butker punished because he said doubleplus-ungood things about faith and family, including the idea that a woman’s role as a mother and wife is irreplaceable by a career alone.
As for the inferior hypothetical female kickers that would replace Butker in Kansas City’s lineup, Hamm says this: “It would be delightful if one of them cost the Kansas City Chiefs kicker his job.”
For once, we’re in agreement. Then again, I’ve rooted against the Chiefs in every one of those four Super Bowls they’ve appeared in, so our biases on this matter differ.
I’d also think it would be delightful if my hometown New York Giants were to pick Butker up and the Chiefs were stuck with some random woman from the University of Manitoba struggling to kick from outside of 45 yards, all because Mr. Hamm and his dim mob of cultural ambulance chasers got themselves in a lather about someone expressing mainstream Christian beliefs in public.
