Super Bowl XLVI: Will the Kickers Decide? Since the Super Bowl matchup was decided a couple weeks ago, the spread on Sunday's game between the Giants and the Patriots has bounced around three points. It's been a long time since I studied statistics and probability (and maybe I never did, depending on how you define "study"), but it seems to me that this betting line is saying a few things. First, it'll be a close game. Second, one of the two teams is likely to have kicked a field goal at some point to get its final lead. Or third, if one team is trailing toward the end of the fourth quarter, it might well get a chance to kick a field goal to tie or win the game. Lastly, and this, really, is the red zone I'm driving toward: Everything will probably just come down to, in Peyton Manning's memorable words, an "idiot kicker." That's why, after calling your bookie and laying in your store of chips and beer, you might want to finish your preparations for the big game by revisiting Michael Lewis's article for Play magazine in October 2007, "The Kick Is Up and It's . . . a Career Killer." Here's Lewis, who as a kid was present at the game in which Tom Dempsey set the N.F.L. record for the longest field goal in 1970 (63 yards), on the Scylla and Charybdis that confront one tortured subset of football player: A kicker in the N.F.L. can be one of two things: the bland technocrat who does what he's assigned to do but who, even when he's exceptionally good, must accept that the coach and the team will be credited for the victory. Or he can be the little choke artist who is very nearly entirely responsible for the loss. What follows is a funny and revealing look at kicking clutchness and the psychology of playing a position in which you're only as good as your last big miss. Of being, in other words, the figure who will like as not decide this weekend's game.