For those who don’t follow the NFL, the Chicago Bears experienced a heartbreaking end to their season, losing to the Philadelphia Eagles when the potential game-winning field goal hit both the upright and the crossbar before bouncing back onto the field. It was, as the following post noted, a double doink:
To add insult to injury, NBC replayed footage just afterward of Parkey hitting the uprights four times in the same game against the Detroit Lions. It’s not like the Bears didn’t know the risk of retaining Parkey as their kicker.
It also didn’t have to be this way. The Bears used to have a great kicker, Robbie Gould, but rather than pay him a free-agent salary, they let him go to the 49ers, where he was #1 in the NFL in 2018 in successful field goal percentage. Parkey was 28th. As our fellow EPB contributor Tom Fredrickson noted via text, this early end to the Bears’ season was on the GM.
Oddly enough, this wasn’t the only game this weekend where the kicking game figured prominently. You would think that NFL teams would have someone who could assume basic kicking duties in an emergency, just as baseball teams usually have an emergency catcher on their roster, but apparently that isn’t the case. Seattle’s kicker, Sebastian Janikowski, pulled a hamstring attempting a field goal before halftime during the Seahawks’ loss to the Dallas Cowboys Saturday night. A nationwide TV audience was then treated to the sight of Seattle’s punter employing dromop kicks when the Seahawks could not avoid having to kick the ball. If I were a head coach in the NFL, I would take note to invest in a little cross-training.
