The kicker on the bench: Tyler Bass, Brandon Aubrey and the call Jim Miller has to make again

Every Sunday morning, somewhere in this league, an owner looks at the kicker spot a few seconds longer than it deserves. It is the smallest decision on the lineup card, the one most owners make with the coffee still hot. Last Sunday it was the decision that settled a game.

Jim Miller started Brandon Aubrey. Aubrey kicked one extra point, and that was his whole afternoon. Tyler Bass, the other kicker on the Miller Time roster, sat on the bench and made four field goals, the longest from 47 yards, plus three extra points. Fifteen points, and not one of them counted.

The Fumblers won 96.08 to 82.54, and if you put Bass's 15 where Aubrey's one was, that 14-point swing turns the afternoon into a 96.54 to 96.08 win by less than half a point.

There. I've done the arithmetic once, and I'm not going to keep doing it, because it's the least interesting part of the story. Anybody can add. The harder part is about a man who made a choice before kickoff with what he knew then, and two kickers who had no say in it at all.

I want to be fair to the call first, because I think it deserves that. Aubrey is not a fill-in. He has 40 points through six weeks, a shade under seven a week, which is exactly the kind of steady line you pick a kicker for. Kicker is the one spot where the old wisdom says pick your man and live with him, because the week-to-week noise is so loud that chasing it usually makes you look silly by Thanksgiving. One point on Sunday afternoon doesn't make Aubrey the wrong choice on Sunday morning. Sometimes it just means kickers are kickers.

And I'll say plainly what I don't know, which is what Jim saw. I asked him this week how he settled on Aubrey and how he thinks about the position from week to week. I haven't heard his answer yet, so I'm not going to supply one. Maybe it was the matchup. Maybe it was a forecast. Maybe it was simply trust in a kicker who had earned some. All of those are reasonable, and none of them is mine to print as his.

Here is why I can't let it go, though. It wasn't one week. In Week 5, Bass scored 10 points and Aubrey scored four. In Week 6 it was 15 to one. Two weeks running, the man on the bench side of this decision has outkicked the man on the other side. Two weeks isn't proof of anything. Kickers get hot the way shooters get hot, and I've watched plenty of hot streaks cool off in a hurry. But two weeks is a question, and I think a fair-minded person can ask it out loud without calling anybody a fool.

I'd love to hear Bass talk about that Sunday in his own words: what four kicks in one game feel like, how a kicker stays sharp when he doesn't know whether his name will be on the card. Until he tells me, I'll stick to what he did, which was make every kick he tried.

The reason this matters more than one kicker's afternoon is the standings. Miller Time is 3-3, 2-1 in the Remote, two games behind Sports Ballers. This club has also allowed the fewest points in the league, which tells you something about how a lot of these Sundays have gone: grind it out, keep it close, and then don't give it back a few points at a time.

Casey Monroe, who covers the Remote for BSN, told me this week that Sports Ballers are the team to beat on the record but, in his view, not yet proven. He pointed to their one loss, by 51 to Fifth Quarter, and to the fact that they haven't faced another 5-1 club until they meet the Fumblers this weekend. Two games back, Casey says, is catchable. I agree with him. I'd only add that the first head-to-head comes in Week 8 at Sports Ballers, and "catchable" stays true only if we stop leaving games on the bench.

So here's my take, and it's only mine. If I'm setting the card this week, I start Bass. Not because Aubrey has lost anything I can measure, and not because two weeks erases six, but because when you're two games back in October you ride the hot hand and sort out the long view in December. If Jim sees it differently, I'd honestly like to hear why. A good reason from the man who makes the call would beat my opinion every time.

First comes Likely 2 Punt, a 3-3 team on a two-game skid, at our place Sunday, and somebody on our side of the field has to decide who kicks.