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SPORTS ILLUSTRATED AUGUS T 26–SEP TEM
BER 2, 2019
“Nine guys is ridiculous!” says Mike Westhoff, a long-
time special teams coordinator for the Jets and the Saints.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t look at nine guys, but I wouldn’t
look at nine guys in a pile. That makes it a sham.”
Adam Vinatieri, the Colts’ likely Hall of Famer, is
entering his 24th NFL season. He says the most com-
petitors he ever faced in training camp was three, before
his rookie season in New England. He reflects for a
moment, then chuckles. “Nine guys? I don’t know... .”
NORMALLY, KICKERS spend camp toiling in se-
clusion and relative anonymity. It was imme-
diately clear this wouldn’t be the case in Lake Forest.
During his first meeting with the 80-something rook-
ies, coach Matt Nagy introduced himself and his staff,
then cued up highlights from Chicago’s 2018 season
playing over a rap beat... until the 43-yard miss and
the aftermath. The team mascot, Staley, falls to the
ground. Parkey hangs his head. Nagy’s mouth is agape,
his eyes darting back and forth as if searching for an
alternative ending.
The next day the kickers began work on their own
field. After a couple of hours the battalion of special-
ists was marched down a dirt path to join the rest of
the team. The kickers were told to stay warm, so they
The state of confusion grew out of the early stages of a
kicker search the likes of which none of the participants
could have anticipated, marked by unyielding pressure,
conspiracy theories, cryptic analytics, a bizarre air of
secrecy and a coaching staff’s obsession with the final,
heartbreaking moment of last season.
Over beers and greasy appetizers the quartet reviews
the week’s events in hopes of answering one over arching
question: What the hell was that?
MOMENTS AFTER the final selection of the 2019
NFL draft was announced in April, Emmit Car-
penter’s phone rang. It was Chris Tabor, Chicago’s special
teams coordinator, inviting the former University of
Minnesota kicker to rookie mini-
camp for a tryout. Carpenter gladly
accepted. A few hours later he
texted a couple of fellow kicking
prospects he’d gotten to know dur-
ing the predraft process. Where are
you going? He asked Purdue’s
Evans and Notre Dame’s Justin
Yoon. The responses from both:
Chicago, how about you?
Before the draft began, the
Bears already had three kick-
ers on the roster: Redford Jones, Chris Blewitt and
Elliott Fry. Sources around the league typically say
four, maybe five kickers is the maximum teams bring
in for an open competition. After the text exchange,
Carpenter believed he’d be one of six. He was wrong.
When Alex Kjellsten, a kicker-punter out of
McNeese State, arrived at Halas Hall, he didn’t notice
anything strange until he walked into the cafeteria:
kickers, everywhere. He recognized a few from YouTube
highlight videos. There was the Minnesota State kicker
with the long blond hair (Casey Bednarski) and the
San Diego State guy (John Baron II).
Last January the Bears’ season came to a screeching
halt in a 16–15 wild-card playoff loss to the Eagles, when
Cody Parkey’s potential game-winner from 43 yards
was tipped at the line before hitting the left upright,
then the crossbar. NBC’s Cris Collinsworth coined it
the “double-doink,” and the heart-wrenching sound
still echoes through greater Chicago.
The Bears released Parkey in March, and the search
for a replacement has been on ever since. But the size
of the group they initially brought in suggested less a
kicker competition and more the formation of a K-pop
band: nine kickers, and zero NFL regular-season at-
tempts among them.
DOINK, DOINK
His season-
ending kick
was the sixth
time Parkey hit
an upright last
season.
JEFF H
AYN
ES
