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Cody Parkey was 3 for 3 before lining up for the infamous 43-yard field goal attempt against the Eagles. This game-losing miss was not only literally an inch away from ricocheting through the inside angle of the upright, but another single inch from not being blocked in the first place. Either would have prevented the term “double-doink” from ever being uttered in the days following. Not to mention – but mentioning – had he not been iced, the kick he booted before the miss went straight down Broadway without a doubt, and with leg to spare.
From the Chicago Bear’s perspective, this situation was never supposed to happen in the first place. The Bear’s offense was supposed to score more than one pathetic touchdown against the Eagle’s 30th ranked defense. It failed. The defense was supposed to dominate enough to make up for the still un-blossomed offense. It failed. Cody Parkey almost absolved them all. Had it all gone an inch differently in just one of those two possible ways, Cody Parkey would have been carried off Soldier Field like Ditka. A hero. Headlines might have read: “Park-4!”, or “Ice Cold Cody”. People would have thought back of his regular season troubles as one thinks back of the memorable career of 1998 first-overall NBA draft pick Michael Olowokandi. Who? Exactly.
Hot take here. But, despite the vitriolic reactions of fans leaving Soldier Field, or those destroying TV’s at home, I’m taking a stand. I’m doing the right thing. The Chicago Bears had the right kicker on hand at Soldier Field on that fateful night. He was right there. It just didn’t work out. And that Chicago Bear’s kicker has a name.
Robbie. Fucking. Gould.
Sitting in the stands of Soldier Field with his family, Robbie Gould was there, but he wasn’t. The hero Bear’s fans needed was in the right place at the right time under the wrong circumstances. I am here to investigate, indict, and put on blast the real culprit for this entire fiasco: Chicago Bears General Manager, Ryan Pace.
Disclaimer: I get it, Ryan Pace has done a pretty damn good job revamping a sorry franchise into a likely perennial playoff caliber team. But that is entirely not the point. If you’ve read the Stathole Manifesto, you know not to appeal to authority for authority’s sake. The point here is, Ryan Pace – a proponent of analytics in football – disregarded basic statistics and made an incorrect emotional decision to cut Robbie Gould. As you will soon see, he fell hard for the psychological trap of loss aversion and failed to properly consider the data properly. Allow me to demonstrate how Ryan Pace is the one left kicking himself now.
Forget about Parkey. He wasn’t in the equation. To properly critique the decision to cut Gould after the 2015 season, it’s only fair to limit the analysis to information accumulated before 2016. So it would not be fair to mention Robbie Gould’s absurd 96.4 percent accuracy in his following three seasons. That is officially stricken from the record. So is anything else that happened post-2015 like being a perfect 6 for 6 in 50-plus yarders. It also wouldn’t be fair to mention that now with a career average of 87.8 percent, Robbie Gould is the second most accurate kicker in NFL history behind only Justin Tucker. It wouldn’t be fair to mention that Gould’s replacement, Connor Barth, would completely shit the bed in Chicago the following two years. And it goes without saying, it wouldn’t be fair to mention that Gould’s successor would single-footedly take them out from a real chance at a Super Bowl appearance. I won’t mention any of those things in this analysis because, as I said, it wouldn’t be fair.
But maybe, at the time, there was reason to believe Gould’s best days were behind him. If I were to tell you that Gould’s final two years as a Bear would rank as the 24th highest field goal percentage during that year, I’d be lying. It wouldn’t be for that year; it’d be for all-time. 24th. All-time. Basically, if the best 32 kickers of all time all played on teams in 2015, Gould would still be better than eight of them. Then, after the season, Ryan Pace would cut him.
Let’s play a game. I mentioned before that Robbie Gould’s career percentage is second only behind Justin Tucker. Below I have two plots that illustrate all field goal attempts with yardage and results for a given year. Can you guess which one is from Robbie Gould’s 2006 Pro Bowl year?
If you guessed the first plot, you are correct. Don’t kick yourself if you guessed the second plot which includes a lot more 50-yarders and only two more misses. Justin Tucker has a huge leg so it would make sense if that was his. But it’s not. Not at all. The second plot with a measly two additional misses from further distance also belongs to Robbie Gould. It’s from 2015. The season he got cut.
The frat boy logicians will claim maybe those misses towards the end of the 2015 season were a sign that he was no longer good as gold. Obviously, we know now there was plenty more Gould left in Robbie’s pot. It wouldn’t be fair to respond to the frat boy logicians by showing each and every one of Gould’s field goal results after getting cut in the plot below. Doing so would be falling into a hindsight bias. And that wouldn’t be fair at all.
Showing this plot of 96 percent field goal accuracy isn’t necessary because there was enough data to vindicate Gould available in 2015. Gould missed two game deciding field goals in 2015, leading to his demise in Chicago. Clusters of data such as this lead people to incorrectly assume there’s a causal reason for it. Let’s focus just on those kicks for now. Might this have been just a random cluster? Or was Robbie missing two kicks in a row a sign of an empty pot?
This is where statistics opens the door to the frat house and slaps this theory silly. To answer this, we need to consider the odds of that Robbie Gould misses two kicks in a row. That’s about 2 percent. Drawing any conclusions from this alone however would be cherry-picking. If you look more holistically at all his kicks that year, he attempted 39 kicks – a career high. Taking his career field goal average of 85.5 percent, the chances of the NFL’s second most accurate kicker missing two kicks in a row at some point in the 2015 season is a highly probable 58 percent.
Let’s scope-out even more and see how close to reality this figure is for the entirety of Gould’s 11-year career up to 2015. When adjusting for Gould’s career average of 31 field goal attempts per year, randomness would expect him miss two kicks in a row about five times. In reality, this occurred four times. So not only does reality closely reflect the math for 2015, it closely reflects Gould’s entire career with the Bears. No pitchforks needed to pointed towards the second best kicker ever. And all of that data to determine Gould was still gold was at Pace’s fingertips in 2015.
The naysayers will rebut this by mentioning that in 2015, Gould missed twice in a row on two separate occasions; certainly there must be something to that! Couple of things. First, I already proved that when you look at the entirety of Gould’s career to that point, the clusters of two misses in a row were basically as random as expected. Second, the odds of Gould missing twice in a row twice in one season is 24.5 percent, so over the course of his career randomness would expect this to occur about twice. It happened only this once.
Perhaps this was all about the money. Despite Gould once telling the media he really needed a new contract in order to “feed his family”, he was being paid a healthy $4M per year. Cutting him before his guaranteed money ran out cost the Bears dead cap space two years after cutting him. Either this theory doesn’t make much sense or the Bears were really devoted to feeding Gould’s kids the finest private school cuisine.
Was Gould worth $4M? Again, I’m not going to use any data post-2015 to make my point but if you weren’t able to watch any of the 2018-19 Conference Championship games this year, here’s how the kickers performed:
#kickersmatter.
Was Robbie Gould no longer clutch? I’m not even going to waste my time doing the work to debunk the nonsensical notion. Gould was revered for his clutch kicks prior to 2015, so cherry-picking two kicks again would be frat boy logic at its finest. And while I won’t mention he made all his clutch kicks after his time in Chicago, he made all of his clutch kicks after his time in Chicago.
Given the incredible pang of loss aversion felt by fans of Chicago after Parkey’s playoff miss, you might wonder why he isn’t given the same leeway for his “random” miss. The reason is, of course, Cody Parkey sucks. Every time this guy lines up it’s Parkey-Roulette. When you consider his overall body of work in 2018, Parkey’s 76.7 percent field goal accuracy was pretty abysmal. In 2015, it was 75 percent. This means in two out of his five years in the NFL, statistically speaking, he flat sucked.
Listen, our brains aren’t designed to look at clusters of data and assume randomness. We’re designed to find inexistent agency. Ryan Pace is supposed to be smarter than that. And in many other ways, he probably is. But he really fucked this one up. Luckily, Robbie Gould is a free agent this year. And after seeing Gould in the suite box not even close to the 50 yard-line, Pace not only has an opportunity to get a world class kicker, he has an opportunity to re-feed a family.
The evidence is all laid out now. There’s no defense left. The real reason the Bears 2018 season ended on that fateful night at Soldier Field came much before the metal vibrations echoed from the goal post and crossbar muting sixty thousand. It came three years earlier from the front office. Falling under the spell of loss aversion, Ryan Pace failed first in cutting Robbie Gould, and failed again in finding Gould’s successor.
Double-doink.
