In the movie Ace Ventura, Ray Finkles field goal miss is blamed on the “laces being in”.
Explain to someone from Europe who doesn’t know American football why that means
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When you kick the ball, you want a nice smooth contact surface. If you kick on the laces, it can mess you up and cause the ball to veer off target.
An American football as laces on one side of the ball 🏈 (see emoji). When kickers kick they went the laces out (away from them) to get a cleaner kick and not shank it left or right. The laces are now used to allow the quarterback to have better grip on the ball while throwing
The player holding the ball for the kicker is in charge of making sure it’s positioned correctly. Part of this is the laces on the football. Laces out just means the laces were facing away from the kicker, so they wouldn’t make contact with them with their foot.
If the laces were in, the kicker’s foot would hit them and possibly send the ball off course.
The laces on a football, which is used when throwing the ball to put spin on the ball, were facing the kicker instead of away from the kicker. This gives a kind of awkward uneven surface to kick he ball, that makes the ball not necessarily go the direction the kicker is trying to kick it.
From likely hall of famer Adam Vinatieri:
>”Laces make a difference,” said Vinatieri. “Laces pointing away from my foot to the middle of the upright is perfect. The lean (of the football) is very important…The lean is probably the most important thing, and the laces are probably the next most important thing.”
>So what happens when the laces are in?
>”If you hit the laces if they’re straight back, and your foot is going right through it, it’s like hitting a baseball not on the sweet spot or a tennis ball with a tennis racket just a couple inches off and it kind of gives you that rattle,” said Vinatieri. “It’s the same kind of feeling when you’re kicking a ball.”
https://www.colts.com/news/laces-out-colts-specialists-weigh-in-on-fg-mechanics-16677692
The ball is oblong and you can’t really kick it in a perfect spiral to make it the most aerodynamic. End over end is the best way for distance anyway. So if the foot comes off the ball different, like sliding off laces, it can impact the trajectory, create wobble, and cause it to go in an unintended direction. Couple that with whatever wind is in the stadium at that time and it can make the ball act different.
For the movie though, It just highlights the psychotic lengths Ray Finkle will go to justify his actions and find something to blame it on other than himself.
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