Cairo Santos injury update: Chiefs place kicker on injured reserve

The Kansas City Chiefs have placed kicker Cairo Santos on injured reserve after he suffered an apparent injury during Week 3 against the Chargers.

Last season, Cairo Santos was a model of consistency for the Kansas City Chiefs as the kicker put up his finest season to date, including making a very accurate 88.6 percent of his field goal attempts in 2016. So far this year, Santos was improving upon that mark and hadn’t missed a field goal or extra point attempt through three games. Unfortunately now the Chiefs will have to move forward without the dependability of Santos with word that the team has placed him on injured reserve.

It’s possible that Santos is out for the full year but there is also an IR designation that allows for a player to return after missing several weeks. Without clarification from the team, it’s impossible to know exactly what happened to Santos and what to expect moving forward.

Interestingly enough, the Chiefs also just auditioned a brand new kicker all throughout the preseason in Sam Ficken. He took over for Santos for several weeks in August because Santos was nursing a groin injury that didn’t seem to go away. He was, however, ready for the regular season and has looked great in the early going—until, as Garafolo explained above, he re-injured it. Ficken seemed to have a good tenure with the Chiefs, but Brett Veach, the team’s general manager, apparently wants to look elsewhere since he grabbed Harrison Butker from the practice squad of the Carolina Panthers.

Butker was the seventh round choice of the Panthers in this year’s draft and left college as Georgia Tech’s all-time leading scorer. He made 15 of 17 field goals during his senior season without missing any extra points.