How a missed field goal brought Cairo Santos to the cliff of his NFL career — and got the Chicago Bears kicker in a franchise record-setting groove

Early in the first quarter of Week 3 last season, Cairo Santos suddenly found himself wondering about his future.

Santos had just pulled a 46-yard field goal attempt, a makable kick indoors at Mercedes-Benz Stadium that left a needy Chicago Bears offense without points after a solid opening drive against the Atlanta Falcons.

With very little equity built up with the Bears to that point, Santos had no idea whether such a mistake might cost him his job. He knew all about the Bears’ scars at the kicking position since Robbie Gould’s 2016 departure. (Did someone say “double doink?”) And Santos understood the organization’s desperation to get things fixed.

On top of that, he previously had been shown the door by a half-dozen teams over his first six years in the NFL, most recently cut by the Tennessee Titans, who released him a day after he missed four kicks in a 14-7 loss in October 2019.

Shortly after he tugged his 46-yard attempt against the Falcons, Santos found himself thinking about his failed stops in Tennessee and Tampa, Fla., and about his roller coaster battle over several years to overcome a nagging groin issue.

“There was a little flashback that popped in my head,” Santos said after Friday’s practice at Halas Hall. “I always felt that pressure. I put that pressure on myself that this has to be the opportunity where I bounce back.

“(It was like) how many more opportunities am I going to keep getting? I have to make this one.”

For a brief moment, Santos considered moving on to a new career and increased fatherhood duties with his newborn son. His patience was thinning.

“(It was like) why am I kicking so well in practice and I keep getting workouts and keep balling out at workouts and feeling like myself again but in games it’s not showing. Why am I having these misses?”

Somehow, though, Santos felt an odd serenity as the game went on. He felt free of much of the pressure he often puts on himself and accepted whatever might come next.

“The confidence in myself never went away,” he said. “But it was a lot about me accepting that who knows when this journey is going to end. … It was accepting that this is not going to last for long. But how long can I make it last?”

As the Bears gear up for Saturday’s preseason opener against the Miami Dolphins, placekicking isn’t really on the team’s radar. How weird is that? A Bears training camp without kicking anxiety.

Santos’ kicking periods in practice aren’t charted by reporters the way Eddy Piñeiro’s and Elliott Fry’s were in Bourbonnais during “The Great Kicker Hunt of 2019.” There isn’t a weekly log of new kickers who have either signed with the team or are spinning through for a tryout.

Instead, there’s calm at Halas Hall with full belief that Santos can be a long-term answer. The team rewarded him with a three-year, $9 million extension in March. And Santos continues his quest to prove it was money well spent.

After that missed kick in Atlanta last fall? Santos made 27 consecutive field goals through the end of the regular season. That hot streak set a new franchise record. He then added a 36-yard field goal in the playoff loss to the New Orleans Saints.

Of the 60 field goals and extra points Santos attempted after that pivotal miss against the Falcons, the only kick that didn’t put points on the board for the Bears was a point-after-touchdown attempt that was blocked by the Detroit Lions in Week 13.

Quite simply, Santos found his groove and feels he’s still in that zone.

After that miss in Atlanta, Santos found himself pressing less and feeling looser with everything. On Friday, he identified last year as “life changing” with the way he kicked, the birth of his son and the positive head space he found.

The aggravation with that miss? The thought of losing his job? The idea of being out of football? It didn’t fluster him the way he might have expected.

“There was no fear,” Santos said. “The thing was I just accepted it. Obviously, I wanted to keep playing. But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m afraid that my career’s over after today.’ It wasn’t that. It was just like, I want another opportunity.”

Those opportunities came. So did the makes. One after another after another. Twenty-seven field goals in a row over the final 13 games of the regular season.

Said Bears special teams coordinator Chris Tabor: “With the great ones, when you have a great year, now it’s can you stack them? And the only way to stack things is to go through the daily grind and the daily process. When you do that you give yourself a chance.”

Santos’ immersion in the grind and his overall reliability has remained evident through the first two weeks of training camp.

It’s to the point kicker talk around Chicago is no longer a thing. Imagine that.

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