CALL THEM FAKE KICKS
Practice success of Fry, Pineiro is a nice storyline, but it means nothing until they can do it in games
Ah, Bears training camp, where hope flows, dreams live and 16-0 is a distinct possibility. It is into this wonderland that I tiptoe, knowing that truth sometimes is looked upon as the ultimate buzzkill and that the bearer of it had better be helmeted, padded and most definitely cupped.
So when Elliott Fry made a 60-yard field goal in practice Saturday and his kicking competition, Eddy Pineiro, made a 63-yarder the next day and news accounts had a bright shaft of light coming down from heaven and an accompanying voice declaring that it sure looked like the Bears’ kicking game was headed in the right direction, I couldn’t help but notice that nobody was actually rushing the kickers or that the kicks weren’t made in a real game.
The only pressure on Fry and Pineiro was that Cody Parkey blew a playoff game for the Bears last season and that the team spent the offseason going through a spin cycle of a kicking competition, with lots of slight, earnest men coming and going from Halas Hall. Don’t get me wrong: That’s a significant amount of pressure. An entire city believes that if Parkey had made that field goal against the Eagles in the wild-card game, the Bears would have made it to the Super Bowl.
But it’s worth pointing out — and
I do so in the smallest voice possible so as to avoid a mob action — that the pressure of 11 angry men rushing a kicker and a stadium with 65,000 queasy Bears fans who can’t bear to watch any more catastrophes is another matter altogether. That’s the only standard that counts.
But this is where we are right now, folks. Cheering practice kicks.
If you’re saying that I’ve made training camp a no-win situation for the Bears and their kickers in the competition to replace Parkey, you might be right. Or you can say the team created this mess by giving Parkey a four-year, $15 million last season. You can say they compounded it by bringing in more than a dozen kickers in the offseason and choosing two to take to Bourbonnais who have never kicked in a regular-season NFL game. It ensured a couple of things: that all
eyes would be on Fry and Pineiro in camp and that their successes would be pooh-poohed by the likes of me.
But Bears fans are so desperate to get some distance from the Parkey debacle that they would have swooned over a successful shoe-tying by either kicker. The crowd at Sunday’s practice chanted Pineiro’s name as he lined up his 63-yarder. If you had pointed out that it’s not unusual for high school kickers to blast 50-yarders these days, an adoring crowd of 8,813 would have drowned you out. Pineiro made a 73-yarder off a tee while in high school, with no rushers, and an 81-yard field goal off a tee with nobody rushing when he was at the University of Florida. Don’t tell the crowd that, either. They might have a group coronary.
“I’ve never seen so many people cheer so loud in a practice before,” Pineiro said Sunday. “I’ve heard it in a game. But in a practice, it’s unreal.”
Maybe anywhere else, it’s unreal. Not here. It’s still hard to believe that the Bears allowed this situation to get to where it is today. They might very well have found their kicker via that sitcom of an offseason competition, but the smart thing would have been to take more of the doubt out of the equation. Spend a little more money and find somebody with more experience.
But, again, far be it from me to throw a wet blanket over the joyfest! Fans really, really want this to work. In Chicago, there seems to be a consensus that the only thing separating the Bears from a trip to the Super Bowl this season is a kicker who knows to send the football through the uprights, not off them. So if that’s Pineiro, Fry or a trained pony, they don’t care.
Coach Matt Nagy has been complimentary of the two kickers but, having been burned so badly last season, seems unwilling to give all of his enthusiasm to them. That’s the smart approach. Support them but reserve judgment until they succeed in something resembling an actual football game.
That people are roaring for a 60-yard kick in practice is a perfect reflection of where the Bears are. We all know how it came to this, but it still doesn’t feel any better that it has. It feels tenuous. After what happened last season, tenuous is the last thing you want.
But, again, here Chicago is, cheering practice kicks. Apparently, you have to start somewhere.