It never gets any easier.
That’s what Cairo Santos tells young kickers who ask how he deals with the ups and downs of a profession in which he’s become one of the NFL’s elder statesmen.
At 34, Santos is the oldest Bear and the fifth-oldest kicker in the league. He’s in his 12th season. When he makes a mistake, though, the frustration doesn’t dissipate any faster than it used to.
“I feel just how I felt in Year 1, Year 2, where it bothers you the same,” Santos, who was voted a captain last week, told the Sun-Times. “Just because you’ve achieved more and have lasted longer in the league and have made a career, you still want to deliver for your team.”
That didn’t happen Monday night, when Santos sliced a 50-yard field goal that would have given the Bears a 14-point lead on the first play of the fourth quarter and then failed to boot a kickoff through the back of the end zone with 2:02 to play, costing the Bears a chance to let the two-minute warning stop the clock after the Vikings ran their first play. The Bears didn’t get the ball back until the nine-second mark in a game they lost by three.
“Nobody feels worse about that than Cairo,” special teams coordinator Richard Hightower said.
Santos took the blame for not making sold enough contact on either the field goal or the kickoff.
The Bears had other options. Hightower said he didn’t consider having punter Tory Taylor handle kickoffs. They could have kicked out of bounds. One complicating factor: Santos has never before had to kick the ball out of bounds on purpose. In a quirk of the league’s new kickoff rule, Santos also could have kicked anywhere other than the designated landing zone and the clock would have stopped the second the ball landed.
“I could kick the ball 1 yard in front of me and it’s a dead ball,” he said. “It would have been like kicking out of bounds.”
Field position, though, would be compromised — the Vikings could have tried a field goal after three runs.
After making the extra point to inch the Bears within three points, Santos ran into the huddle and was told kick off through the back of the end zone. He thought he could do it even though he was kicking into a slight breeze coming from the south — it was measured at 6 mph when the game began.
“I knew it was going to take my absolute best ball,” Santos said. “I didn’t put the best ball out there. I try not to have doubt when the coach asks me to do something. if I believe I can do it, I try to find my confidence in doing that.”
The field goal try bothered Santos just as much. He spent the offseason working on distance, the result of practicing at a Jacksonville, Fla., park that had a pond on one end a fence on the other. The only way to keep the ball dry, and inflated, was to kick from deep. That work paid off in the preseason, when he made a 57-yard field goal against the Dolphins that would have been the longest of his career.
When Santos missed the field goal Monday, he dwelled on it on the sideline for a minute or two.
“Then you know that you have to put it behind you because the game could come down to it,” he said. “And then after, you have to watch film to relive those things. …
“You can’t run from it. It’s always going to be a part of it, for every player in this building that critiques themselves, to deal with those things. Then you put it on the back burner and move on.”