Coach Killer, Week 3: Olindo Mare

Every week, NFL FanHouse hits the lowlights from Sunday's action, looking at those players who did the most to move their head coaches that much closer to returning to the Bed and Breakfast business.

Football is very often a game in which the 21 men not carrying the ball all do significant work in determining what happens on the given play. Field goals and extra points are usually the exception. While, yes, there is the occasional bad snap or missed block that throws everything into oblivion, most of the time kicking is like clockwork -- the ball is safely pinned to the ground by the holder, and everybody becomes irrelevant except for one guy. The kicker.

I think it's pretty stupid, personally.

I'm not the only one who thinks that kickers shouldn't factor into scoring in the NFL, and following Sunday my crowd was probably one bigger, at least temporarily.

"There's no excuses for those. If you're a kicker in the National Football League, you should make those kicks. Bottom line. End of story. Period. No excuses. No wind. Doesn't matter.

"You've got to make those kicks, especially in a game like this when you're kicking and scratching and fighting and playing your tail off and you miss those kicks? Not acceptable. Not acceptable. Absolutely not acceptable."

Those are the words of Jim Mora after watching Olindo Mare miss out on six points thanks to botched field goals from 43 and 34 yards. The margin of victory in the eventual Bears win over the Seahawks? Six points.

He later backed off those comments, saying "I let the emotion of the game get to me in my answers about Olindo," and that "I have very high, high expectations for Olindo, and it's because of the work that he has done in this league. He has been an outstanding kicker."

Really? Outstanding? A kicker who, last year's inexplicable exception aside, hasn't booted better than 85 percent since 2001-02?

If you're an NFL fan, I shouldn't have to explain to you how egregious of a performance that is, even if Mare did make four other kicks in that game, including one from 46. You would think that would earn him some leeway, but it doesn't. Whether it's fair or not, you have to be damn near perfect as an NFL kicker. Everyone is already resentful that they have to see you trot onto the field for a number of plays a game. You're not just kicking for points, you're kicking to justify your very existence.

Mare didn't justify his very well.

Such is the life of the NFL kicker. You make some and you miss some. Oftentimes the game comes down to you, whether literally (a last-second chance) or in the points you leave on the field throughout the game (like the six Mare abandoned). Hey, Mare didn't make the rules, he just goes out there and does his job (or tries and fails).

Maybe he's not the coach killer. Maybe the real killer is the system which dictates that job exists in the first place.