Instead of condolences, congratulations are in order for Kevin Butler.
Placekickers might not get a lot of respect in the National Football League, but they do get other jobs, and the hunch here is that Butler could land one by the time you wrap yesterday’s trash in today’s column for tomorrow’s pickup.
More Top Picks Best Garmin Fitness Watches
Butler’s last memory of Soldier Field thus will be a rear-view mirror mural, suitable for framing, from Thursday night’s quagmire, in which he did not participate. Butler thus spent his final hours with the Bears trying to survive the NFL’s worst facility, anyway.
How fitting. It is impossible to replace your divots in that pigpen, so you replace kickers. Carlos Huerta is next, and the Bears can only hope he’s a mudder.
Huerta did make a 27-yard field goal during this soggy and shortened exhibition, but the flight path was so wobbly, even superfan Michael Pantazis would have been overmatched to leap from his seat and catch the ball in anything but a fish net.
Still, after sleeping on the conundrum and pronouncing the competition “very, very close,” coach Dave Wannstedt opted for the younger, cheaper alternative. The decision was not reached until the wee hours Friday morning, according to Wannstedt, who did not deny that Huerta would have had to be absolutely awful throughout training camp to be gone.
In other words, the job Huerta never had was his to lose.
“I’d feel a lot better about this if I’d got beaten out in a fair fight,” Butler said. “But I didn’t. If they wanted to go in a different direction, I could deal with that. I asked for my release before camp and again this week.
“If this decision was made during the off-season, which it was, why did they bother keeping me around? I understand (vice president of operations) Ted Phillips was telling people in the office three months ago that I’d be cut before the opening game.”
Phillips denies that allegation: “Absolutely false.”
“In that case,” Butler concluded, “he’s a liar too.”
Wannstedt believes, and correctly so, that Soldier Field should be an advantage for the Bears, even when they don’t need lightning to provide electricity. Butler was perceived as the ultimate foul-weather warrior, but the Bears have ammunition to the contrary. To wit:
In the last five years, visiting teams have converted 59 of 79 field-goal attempts while the Bears are 56 of 81. Last season, foes were 10 of 12 here, Butler 13 of 19. Then again, by kicking at Soldier Field eight times a year, Butler had more chances to be spooked by the prevailing conditions.
“Stats are stats,” Butler said, “and you can’t argue with them. You also can’t argue that, even though I had a bigger salary, they gave Huerta $75,000 when he signed. That’s $75,000 more than they’ve invested in me this year.”
Wannstedt says he considered Butler’s presence on the Super Bowl XX juggernaut, the positive impact he and his family have had on the community and the possibility that Huerta, for all his experience in Canada, will find Chicago too cold to handle come December.
“But the bottom line,” said Wannstedt, “is what’s best for the team. We have to move on.”
Butler saw the end near even before Friday morning when he entered the office of Danny Abramowicz, the Bears’ special-teams guru, seeking information.
“He told me he had to go to the bathroom,” Butler recalled, “and he never did come out. Far as I know, he’s still in there. Imagine that, my own kicking coach, and he’s hiding in the bathroom. Nice loyalty, huh?”
Kevin Butler will live happily ever after, perhaps in a dome, maybe even with a genuine contender. But there will be a day when he returns to Chicago, as did Andre Dawson, who received some ivy and blades of grass from Wrigley Field.
What will the Bears give Butler from Soldier Field? A puddle? A piece of sod? Or one of those lovely porta-potties with Danny Abramowicz in it?