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. In Year 12, 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 on Thursday. “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.
Santos took the blame for not making sold enough contact on either the field goal or the kickoff. Coach Ben Johnson said Friday that he “got greedy and I wanted the extra five yards” in deciding to kick the ball out of the end zone rather than out of bounds. Under the new kickoff rule, the Bears also could have decided to kick the ball anywhere other than the landing area.
Santos’ two mistakes, though, prompted one change. Friday afternoon, the Bears agreed to sign former 49ers kicker Jake Moody to their practice squad. Moody struggled in Week 1, missing a 27-yard kick off the upright and having a 36-yarder blocked. Moody has struggled since the 49ers made him the 99th pick in the draft two years ago, missing 16 of his 62 career kicks in 32 games.
Santos’ $3.1 million contract this season is fully guaranteed. He has a $5.4 million dead cap charge this year, but only a $1.1 million one next season and $560,000 in 2026. Still, Moody will provide as direct a challenge to Santos as the Bears have had in years.
After making the extra point to inch the Bears within three points Monday, Santos 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. 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 before moving on. He’s felt the weight of Monday’s game this week, too.
“You can’t run from it,” he said. “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.”