An Idea to Adjust the Distance Between Posts for Field Goals Ken Belson of The Times wrote an article Monday about the whiz-bang technology that allows football goal posts to sink to the ground with a push of a button and that can adjust the distance between the uprights to account for high school game specifications and for pro/college ones. Coincidentally, a reader recently sent a letter to The Times that was passed to The Fifth Down: For some time now I have felt that in professional football relatively short field-goal attempts, say from the thirty-yard line or less, have become almost automatically successful and have tended to castrate much of the drama and excitement of a football drive. They also enable a team on offense to avoid the tough decision-making and play execution that is required to keep the momentum going deep into opponent territory. I propose that a way to treat this, while maintaining the form and integrity of the field-goal concept, would be to mechanize the goal posts so that the space between the two uprights could be narrowed in one or two or perhaps three increments as a team on offense reaches certain yard lines within a defender's territory. For example, when the line of scrimmage reaches the thirty-yard line, the uprights could narrow, then narrow further when the twenty-yard line is reached and maybe further again at the ten-yard line. The effect of this is obvious. More of the fundamental run and pass structure and excitement of basic football would be preserved while the enervating consequence of ho-hum field goals are greatly reduced. Seems pretty win-win to me. O. Kelley Anderson, New York Extra Point Field-goal accuracy is on the rise. Another reason to consider the flexibility of narrowing the width of the kicking target is the automatic nature of extra points. Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats, writing for The Washington Post, said: "If the NFL success rate is over 99%, why even have it? Why not simply give 7 points for a touchdown and allow a team to choose to gamble the 7th point on a two-point conversion attempt? Last year, Bill Belichick suggested the elimination of the extra point. Do you agree that adjusting the positioning of the goal posts could make sense for chip-shot field goals and extra points?