In a surprising development the Kansas City Chiefs have lost kicker Cairo Santos for the season. This has the possibility of being the biggest loss for the Chiefs to date.
A kicker in the NFL is like a closer in major league baseball, people don’t notice them until they go bad. Look at Chiefs history; they have one of the only kickers enshrined in the NFL Hall of Fame in Jan Stenerud and another who played for the Chiefs in Morten Andersen. Yet the kicker you hear about most is the guy who missed three field goals during the devastating playoff loss in 1995. And no, I will never say his name.
For those of us who are big Kansas City Royals fans you will see the damage that losing closer Wade Davis has done to this season. The Royals have 12 blown saves in a year when they will miss out on the playoffs by six games. The Chiefs are looking at a future of facing this same scenario without Santos.
For those who don’t know, Santos has been on pace to be the greatest kicker in team history. He’s made more field goals (86) and scored more points (371) in his first three years than any other Chiefs player. He has the highest field goal percentage (84.8 percent) of any Chiefs kicker ever. He’s also been as clutch as any kicker in the league during his first three seasons. He’s been perfect in the playoffs on field goals and extra points going 12-12 overall. He has three game-winning field goals in his career including the “doink heard round the world” against the Denver Broncos last year. Santos is the Wade Davis of the Chiefs.
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Now the Chiefs have lost Santos to injured reserve and will replace him with a rookie who has yet to take the field for an NFL regular season game. That rookie was a 2017 seventh round draft pick of the Carolina Panthers named Harrison Butker. He was a successful kicker for Georgia Tech who made 88% of his kicks during his final season. He has a strong leg to kick at the NFL level, and he can boom it through the end zone on kickoffs. But as Robert Aguayo will attest, kicking in the NFL is a lot different than kicking in college.
Santos was able to make the leap as a rookie out of Tulane, as he jumped right in and didn’t miss a beat. If Butker can come in and perform well, then not only will Santos injury not hurt the Chiefs, he could be forgotten. If Butker goes into the playoffs and kicks the Chiefs to a win, he’ll be a hero and people will be talking about the injury to Santos like the injury to Spencer Ware—that it was a blessing in disguise for the franchise. But that is a lot of big ifs to put on a rookie who’s joined a team with Super Bowl expectations.
I know what we are talking about here. Herm Edwards said it best during an episode of Hard Knocks when he laughingly said, “We are talking about a kicker.” It’s hard for us as football fans to ever give to much credit to a kicker until we need them to win a game. Eric Berry is a playmaker in the secondary and an inspiration to us all. But I’m here to tell you that the loss of Santos has the chance to mean far more to the success of the Chiefs than the loss of Berry. Then again if Butker is good, Santos name could be lost to history. If that’s not a lot of pressure on a rookie kicker, I don’t know what is.