Bears to add kicker Jake Moody to practice squad, so is the pressure on Cairo Santos?
Friday afternoon marked the fourth day this week a Chicago Bears coach had to address the touchback that wasn’t, the kickoff the team tried with 2 minutes, 2 seconds remaining in Monday night’s loss to the Minnesota Vikings that didn’t make it out of Soldier Field’s south end zone as kicker Cairo Santos promised it would.
Santos felt confident he could get enough leg on that kick to save the Bears precious seconds in their comeback effort against the Vikings, with a touchback allowing the Bears to stay on the right side of the two-minute warning with another timeout still in their pocket.
However, Santos came up 3 yards short with Vikings return man Ty Chandler catching the football at the top of the orange “E” in the end zone and bringing it out to the 26-yard line. Seven valuable seconds came off the clock. The two-minute warning coincided with the change of possession timeout. And suddenly, the Bears were in bigger trouble than they thought they would have been late in a dispiriting season-opening loss.
The ins and outs of the Bears’ decision-making for that kickoff have been probed and explained throughout Week 2. So it was little surprise coach Ben Johnson was perturbed by another question about the sequence before the team’s Friday afternoon practice ahead of Sunday’s game against the Detroit Lions.
“Last time I’m going to bring up the last game, OK?” Johnson bristled. “I got greedy. I wanted the extra 5 yards. That’s why we tried to kick it out of the back of the end zone. Simple as that, OK?”
Asked whether the Bears might consider a shake-up with their kicking situation going forward, Johnson remained curt.
“We’re always having conversations every week on the special teams, and how we want to go into each week,” he said.
And that was that.
As it turns out, one of those conversations inside Halas Hall led the Bears to a decision to sign Jake Moody to their practice squad, a league source confirmed to The Athletic. This acquisition puts the heat on Santos’ efforts to bounce back. Moody was waived by the San Francisco 49ers earlier this week and will now attempt to unseat the most accurate kicker in Bears history in what seems to be set up as a mini-competition — or at least a little push at the 33-year-old Santos.
To be fair to Santos, whose botched kickoff Monday night came not long after he sliced a 50-yard fourth-quarter field-goal attempt wide right, Moody’s Week 1 might have been even rougher.
In his last game with the 49ers, Moody hit the left upright with a 27-yard field-goal attempt and had a 36-yarder blocked. Last season, he missed 10-of-34 field-goal tries along with an extra-point attempt. His accuracy from 40 yards or longer checks in at just 55.2% (16 of 29).
Meanwhile, Santos has made 88.8% of his kicks with the Bears, which includes a short stint in 2017, as well as his current run, which began in 2020. With the Bears, he has made 78.2% of his kicks from 40 yards or longer.
Still, Santos’ leg strength has long been the subject of questions. And he had three kicks blocked last season, including a game-winning 46-yard attempt to beat the Green Bay Packers in Week 11.
On Thursday, Bears special teams coordinator Richard Hightower used a broad brush to paint the picture of Santos’ miss Monday night.
“My diagnosis is it always starts with the operation,” Hightower said Thursday. “That’s snap, hold and kick. That wasn’t clean. Protection was good.”
Hightower was to the point in his explanation of the botched late kickoff by Santos.
“He just didn’t hit it as flush as he wanted to hit it,” Hightower said. “It just didn’t go out the back, and that happens. And guess what? Nobody feels worse about that than Cairo.”
In retrospect, Johnson conceded that he wished he had either instructed Santos to kick the ball directly out of bounds to preserve time, a decision that would have given Minnesota the ball at their own 40 (a touchback would have put it at the 35).
Santos also could have dribbled the ball a foot off the tee, and under the new dynamic kickoff rules, the clock would not have run, and the Vikings would have taken over at their own 40.
As it stands, the Bears (0-1) head to Detroit this weekend to face the two-time defending NFC North champion Lions. And for a team with a thin margin for error, a solid special teams effort will be needed.
It’s presumed, for now, that Santos will retain his placekicking duties. However, the signing of Moody is a sign that the Bears have at least considered a change.
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