Bears kicker Cairo Santos is chasing perfection — and getting closer to it

Bears kicker Cairo Santos remembers the last field-goal try he missed.

“Blocked against Green Bay,” he said. “Forty-yarder. Right hash.”

And the one before that?

“Atlanta,” he said. “The 56-yarder. Crossbar.”

The miss before that was blocked, too — by the Vikings.

“So it’s hitting something,” Santos said. “Either somebody’s hand or the crossbar.”

That’s the full list of field goals Santos has missed since Dec. 20, 2021.

Before he hit the crossbar in Week 11 last season against the Falcons — he kicked a knuckleball off his ankle trying to make a career-long kick — Santos had made 21 field goals in a row. Since having his field-goal try blocked by the Packers’ Dean Lowry in Week 13 last season, he has made 14 straight and counting.

“It’s really hard to be perfect in this craft,” Santos said. “It’s something you chase every time you’re out there.”

Santos is the most successful kicker in Bears history, making 90.8% of his kicks in two stints with the navy and orange. He could miss six in a row and still have a higher percentage of converted kicks with the Bears than Robbie Gould, who ranks second in franchise history.

Since the start of last season, Santos has the best field-goal percentage in the NFL among kickers with at least 20 tries. Since 2020, when he joined the Bears for the second time, he ranks fourth in the league.

Do you realize how amazing that is?

A franchise that was defined by failure at the position, from Cody Parkey’s double-doink to lose a first-round playoff game to the offseason kicker derby to Matt Nagy’s “Augusta Silence,” simply doesn’t have to worry about its kicker. That should be all the motivation the Bears need to re-sign Santos before his three-year, $9 million deal expires at the end of the season.

In the four years after the team cut Gould on the eve of the 2016 season, five Bears kickers — including Santos in a two-game stint in 2017 — made 78% of their field-goal tries. In the 3½ years since, Santos has made 92%.

Santos credits snapper Patrick Scales, with whom he has worked since 2020, and holder Trenton Gill for his hot streak. Scales controls the laces of the ball when he snaps — it often lands in Gill’s hands with the laces pointed the right way, toward the goalpost — and Gill puts the ball down and holds it perfectly still.

“I’ve been feeling the streaks less and less,” Santos said. “Thankfully, I’ve been doing a lot of them since I’ve been here. It’s almost like if I have some miss happen, I know that I’m going to go on another run.”

It hasn’t always been that way. Four years ago last week, Santos missed four field goals — one was blocked — in the Titans’ 14-7 loss to the Bills. The Titans cut him the next day.

“It was an experience that completely changed my career,” he said. “I approached the next opportunity, which ended up being with the Bears, as, ‘I gotta make this. It’s possibly my last opportunity.’ . . . I feel like I was only able to be successful because of those lessons I learned.”

Santos let his nagging groin injury heal. He got rid of the jab step, a common technique for kickers to harness more power. The half-step he took to begin his approach to the ball was messing with his timing.

“You can have more power when you do that, but I think it adds a little bit of inconsistency if that step ends up being too big or too small,” he said.

To compensate, Santos worked on his leg strength, particularly during the last offseason.

“His leg strength is improved; his offseason work has paid off,” special-teams coordinator Richard Hightower said. “The challenges that he’s accepted during practice and the uncomfortable situations we put him in have paid off for him.”

On Sunday against the Raiders, he made a 54-yarder with about six minutes left to go up by three scores. He’s 9-for-13 from 50-plus yards in his second stop with the Bears after going 8-for-17 in his career to that point.

“I’ll take that,” Santos said. “In Chicago?”

His struggles with the Titans help Santos sympathize with kickers whose bad days cost them their jobs.

“I’ve been on the other side,” Santos said. “It’s painful. It’s frustrating when that’s not really your potential. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes streaks and bad things happen. As kickers, you only get that one opportunity.”

At Halas Hall, of all places, field goals are no longer a weekly worry.

“I like to fly under the radar,” Santos said. “I don’t really care for recognition besides my coaches, my teammates and my peers.

“It’s OK to not talk about it. Let’s just do our job.”