Among the gimmicks the Bears have tried this year in their kicking competition was the “Augusta silence” in which everyone stood quietly and still while candidates kicked in practice.
But since they made every turn of their search for a kicker a thing, now the Bears would prefer to borrow another golfing tradition — a little polite applause.
“I think the other thing we’re trying to get to is the clapping, to get it non-existent,” Bears special teams coordinator Chris Tabor said, via J.J. Stankevitz of NBCSportsChicago.com. “A little more of a golf clap, and if you get it to that, that means they expect you to make it. So that’s what we’re trying to get to.”
Every since they made a pariah out of Cody Parkey after last year’s double-doink playoff miss, the Bears have tried just about everything. They had nine guys (including a punter) trying field goals in rookie minicamp, and at the moment have whittled the competition to two.
That’s no guarantee that either Elliott Fry or Eddy Pineiro will be the guy — they’ve already admitted they’re watching every other kicking competition in every other camp — but that’s where they’re at now.
At the moment, things are going well. Pineiro made eight of his nine field goal attempts Thursday, including a 60-yarder. Fry will kick today as they alternate between the two, but the results are already better than the spring workouts.
“To a man, [the] OTA performance wasn’t good enough,” Tabor said. “And they understand that. And we’re out front with that. And they’re performing. They can only control what they can control. And I think both guys are doing that. You know? We’ll see how it plays out.”
And despite creating so much of the attention themselves by the way they’ve approached this search, they hope that eventually seeing a Bears kicker hit a field goal doesn’t require an ovation.