Why Robbie Gould will always be a Bear

Robbie Gould twice kicked a field goal to send a team to the NFC Championship Game — a 49-yarder in overtime to give the Bears a 27-24 victory over the Seahawks in 2007 and a 45-yarder in sub-zero temperatures as time expired to give the 49ers a 13-10 victory over the Packers at Lambeau Field in 2022.

Two exhilarating career-highlight moments. But asked to choose the most memorable kick of his career, he went with the field goal with the 49ers. That was no slight to Bears fans. On the contrary, the fact that he beat the Packers at Lambeau seemed like the tiebreaker.

“I’ve always had a healthy respect for the Packers and that fierce Bears-Packers rivalry,” Gould wrote in a story announcing his retirement in The Players’ Tribune. “More than anything, though, I just absolutely love Bears fans. So to hit a huge kick like that, on the big stage, to continue my streak of never missing a kick in the playoffs AND to also make all of Chicago happy in the process by taking down its rival? It was the best of both worlds.”

That’s why Gould has a special connection with Chicago that goes beyond his 11-year stint with the Bears. He gets it. He gets Bears fans. And he gets what it means to be a Bear. Even after he was unceremoniously cut by general manager Ryan Pace on the eve of Week 1 of the 2016 season, Gould remained a Chicagoan and a Bear through and through.

And Gould’s departure as the best kicker in franchise history was indeed unceremonious. It happened late on a Sunday night, a day after the final cut-down to the 53-man roster.

“I got cut at 9 o’clock at night, and no one was there,” Gould said last year on an appearance on ESPN 1000’s “Waddle & Silvy” show. “There was a trainer, John Fox and Ryan Pace. I didn’t get to say goodbye to anybody in the building for 11 years, and you cut me at the very last minute in hopes that . . . I wouldn’t get a job, which wasn’t the case.”

Let the record show that Gould’s release wasn’t a total surprise. He was coming off two seasons that were below his standard. In 2015, he had three rare misses in the clutch in back-to-back losses to the 49ers and Redskins. Pace’s mistake, however, was not in cutting Gould, but in failing to find a better replacement.

Pace signed veteran Connor Barth, who made 29 of 39 field goals (74.4%) in 2016 and 2017. He then signed Cody Parkey to a four-year, $15 million contract ($9 million guaranteed) in 2018. Parkey made 23 of 30 field goals in the regular season (76.7%), then infamously missed a 43-yarder that hit the left upright and crossbar with 10 seconds left against the Eagles in a 16-15 loss in a wild-card playoff game at Soldier Field.

But where cutting Gould ended up being the worst thing for the Bears, it was the best thing for him. In those three seasons, Gould responded with the best run of his career, making 82 of 85 field goals (96.5%) with the Giants (2016) and 49ers (2017, 2018).

But even with all that post-Bears success, Gould will always be a Bear.

“From start to finish, I loved everything about my time in Chicago,” Gould wrote in The Players’ Tribune story. “Lovie Smith and Jerry Angelo created a team-first culture by assembling a locker room full of future Hall of Famers. To be able to go to work every day surrounded by guys like Brian Urlacher, Julius Peppers, Olin Kreutz, Roberto Garza, Charles Tillman, Lance Briggs and dozens of other first-rate guys — it was the best football home imaginable.”