It wasn't so long ago that NFL kickers seemed almost too good, too reliable. Last month at ESPN, in a story about the early-season flurry of 50-yard field goal attempts, Brooke Pryor wrote that kickers are as accurate as they've ever been, but more importantly, as trusted as they've ever been. “My first couple years here, if it was over 53, it was ‘Let's play a defensive game’ and stuff like that,” Pittsburgh Steelers kicker Chris Boswell told Pryor. “We've always been able to do it … finally, we're getting able to showcase that.”
Maybe Pryor wrote too soon. Boswell, for his part, had the ideal kicking day on Sunday, making 6-of-6 field goal attempts and accounting for all his team's points in Pittsburgh’s 18-16 win over the Ravens. But he and Jacksonville’s Cam Little, who set a Jaguars franchise record with a 59-yard FG, might be the only kickers feeling good this week. Jake Elliott missed three kicks for the Eagles on Thursday; Justin Tucker missed two field goal attempts in Baltimore's two-point loss; Bengals kicker Evan McPherson killed his team’s momentum twice as they tried to come back against the Chargers last night; and Browns kicker Dustin Hopkins’s 32-yard attempt to end the first half of Browns-Saints sailed wide left. (A holding penalty on the Saints granted Hopkins a second chance, but his 27-yard try also hooked left.)
Of course, no epidemic of kicking disasters would ever spare the Chicago Bears. Their decision to fire offensive coordinator Shane Waldron last week was looking smart Sunday afternoon at home against the Green Bay Packers—which is to say they actually scored a touchdown, a feat they hadn’t managed in their previous two games. In some other kinder world, this blog is about how Caleb Williams coolly led the final Bears drive of the game, his team trailing the Packers 20-19 after they stuffed Green Bay’s two-point attempt on a go-ahead fourth-quarter touchdown.
The drive didn’t look promising at first. Williams took two quick sacks to make it third-and-19 at the Bears 20 before the two-minute warning. (While he's been one of the more sack-able NFL quarterbacks in recent memory, Williams had stayed pretty clean all game to this point.) But on the play out of the break, he escaped a literally pouncing Packers lineman and, rolling right, found Rome Odunze to set up a fourth-and-short. Williams hit Odunze again down the sideline for a 20-yard gain, and then Keenan Allen on the first-and-10 to get the Bears to the Packers' 30-yard line. After Roschon Johnson picked up two yards on the ground, the Bears had 30 seconds and a timeout left—enough for another play to get kicker Cairo Santos a little closer. But head coach Matt Eberflus instead chose to settle for the 46-yard attempt and just let the clock wind down to :03 before taking their final timeout. “I wouldn’t mind one more run,” an audibly nervous Tom Brady said in the Fox booth as the seconds ticked off while the Bears offense stood around.
A prophetic Tom Brady, too. Packers defensive lineman Karl Brooks got a finger on Santos's kick, just enough to block it and save Green Bay’s day.
Our pal Kalyn Kahler reported that the Packers were surprised the Bears chose not to run another play. The longer a field goal attempt, the lower a kick’s trajectory needs to be to cover the requisite distance, and the more likely it is to be blocked. Santos himself already kicks low, the Packers players said, making blocked kicks a point of emphasis in special teams meetings. “We've been emphasizing it so much this week,” Packers linebacker Edgerrin Cooper said. “We just saw how low he was kicking the ball, so we knew we had a real good chance of blocking it.”
Before that kick, Santos had made 14-of-16 field goal attempts this season, seven of them from 50-plus yards. He’d also hit a 53-yarder in the first quarter of this game. Maybe Eberflus felt the chances of a blocked or missed field goal were lower than the chances of negative yards on another play: Williams had taken back-to-back sacks to start the drive. But the rookie QB followed those up with big plays under pressure, and as the heartbreaking ending showed, “conservative” decisions involve risk, too.
When asked why he didn’t try to get Santos closer, Eberflus said, “You could say you could do that for sure, maybe get a couple more yards, but you're also going to risk fumbling and different things there.” Monday morning, he said he also planned to send video of the play to the league office because he thought the Packers defenders had made illegal contact with long snapper Scott Daly. The ruling on the field is that the Bears remain 4-6 and last in their division; there's no overturning it. Where this ranks among the saddest field goals attempted at Soldier Field is for you to decide. Where this ranks among the team’s saddest walk-off losses in the past month is also for you to decide.
