Originally Posted by
Mal
All true points. The problem for Parkey, however, is that he did not earn himself any benefit of the doubt over the course of the regular season. He was mediocre, at best (I think he'd missed 7 or 8 FG's and 3 XP's already), with shaky range, had already blown a win by himself in Miami, and was making way too much money for the performance. The miss at the end of the game last night was entirely predictable. He came into the game as the biggest looming weakness on the team, and a lot of people feared this exact outcome.
I'm a Vikings fan, so maybe predisposed to seeing dark linings in every silver cloud, but when Cohen started off the last drive last night with a great kickoff return, I said to the Bears fans in the room "Hey, they're already halfway to where they need to get for Cody Parkey to miss a game winning field goal!"
Had he made a couple from long distance last night before the miss, I could see giving him more credit for the 9 points he'd already scored in the game, but those were all chip shots. And if the median NFL placekicker these days made less than about 80% of their attempts from 40-45 yards, I could see a little more sympathy headed his way for the last one. But they do make 80%+ from that range nowadays. Unfortunately for him, even the fact that the NFL just changed the ruling on the final play to a block isn't going to help him all that much. If it's someone busting up the middle or getting around the end to smother a kick, that's all on the line, but not elevating the kick quickly enough to get the ball over the outstretched arms of a defensive tackle? I think the kicker takes the blame on that one pretty much every time, unless it's a 54-yard attempt or something. He may have kicked it lower intentionally, because when they'd iced him a minute earlier his kick, while successful, was not exactly the booming, halfway up the uprights into the net "would have been good from 53, not 43" sort of result we've all gotten used to seeing in recent years.
All that said, I do wonder if that block changed the amount of fade he would have gotten by modifying the spin, etc. It's possible he was starting it out a little left intentionally, and the tip, while it changed the immediate trajectory to something more in line with the upright instead of wide left, denied the ball its full planned arc. Don't know enough about the physics of kicking footballs, though, to really speculate. In any event, that one strikes me as a "don't give away the hole" putt in golf.