SportsPants

Wow. Talk about going against standard thinking.

If you listed the positions of a football team from most important to least important, you start with quarterback and somewhere toward the bottom of the list would be the kicker. Sure, if the kicker was a stud, you'd rank him higher since he could win several games by himself, but that's a rare breed of kicker.

Most kickers are streaky specialists. As we saw this past season, when a kicker loses any of his confidence, he can melt down quicker than ice cream in August. It seems half of the teams in the NFL had kicking troubles this season. The Cowboys and Redskins both dumped kickers mid-season while the Bengals and Chargers lost playoff games thanks to shoddy kicking.

Kickers just seem interchangeable. A team uses one until he freaks out, then he goes to another team and tries to start fresh.

So why would the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks place franchise tags on middle of the road kickers? I'm confounded, confused, and possibly even flummoxed. Like the Southpark Chewbacca defense, it does not make sense.

Jeff Reed isn't a bad kicker for Pittsburgh, but he didn't exactly set the league ablaze last year. He didn't make any kicks over 50 yards and his kickoffs were routinely short. Worth hanging onto, but not a top three kicker.

Olindo Mare is an even bigger reach for Seattle. He's 36 years old, has only been in Seattle a couple of season and every training camp, the Seahawks coaches bring in competition to overtake him. Mare had a good late season surge last year, but he struggled early. Plus, Seattle used a franchise tag on kicker Josh Brown back in 2006. Brown is now long gone.

Maybe the Seahawks and Steelers saw how badly kickers struggled this past season and don't want to risk losing their guys in free-agency. Maybe the teams are convinced that the kickers will be in the zone next season. Whatever the reason, both teams are paying top dollar to hold into their guys, so they should probably have a team psychologist on site just in case things go a little wacky on their kicker's brain.

Read more of Brad Seal at the original "SportsPants" blog.