Bears Kicker Gets Blasted On Social Media After Sunday's FG Miss

It seemed a little too perfect for the Chicago Bears on Sunday evening during the Wild Card playoff game at home. The Philadelphia Eagles had just scored a touchdown to take a 16-15 lead and missed the two-point conversion with a minute remaining.

The Bears picked their way downfield and got into field-goal position with 10 seconds left on the clock and facing a fourth down. Just before Bears kicker Cody Parkey booted a potential game-winner that split the uprights, the defending Super Bowl Champion Eagles called their final timeout to "ice the kicker."

Professional kickers and their coaches in the National Football League know it's going to happen. They practice for it.

When Parkey and the Bears lined back up for the game-winning field goal, everything looked fine. The snap, the hold and the kick. But as the ball sailed toward the uprights, it drifted left. And then further left. And then further left. And then, clunk, it hit the left upright.

But what happened next with the ball looked confusing at first. The ball appeared to fall downward. When Staley the Bear, the Chicago mascot behind the goalpost, fell, limp to his side, it seemed the ball had richoteced to become a made field goal. However, it wasn't the case.

The ball actually hit the left upright, landed on the crossbar and then fell back into the end zone for a missed field goal.

It was an awkward ending to a fairly bizarre football game filled with peculiar replays that had no explanations, Philly's quarterback — Nick Foles — pulling more tricks from David Copperfield's bag and Chicago fans leaving Soldier Field wondering how they let the game ride on a kicker who had missed 10 field goals in 2018.

But it didn't end there, not in this world of social media and immediate dissatisfaction.

Parkey probably hadn't left Soldier field yet when fans began letting him hear about his clunk heard around the football world. The Bears missed out on a chance to visit top-seeded New Orleans next week. For Bears fans, though, it was about losing the first home playoff game in eight years.

The social media blitz on Parkey probably wasn't fair, and sometimes not funny. But sometimes they were.

For anyone who hasn't seen the last-second field-goal attempt, here's a version in Spanish — no translation needed.

Some claim the kick by Parkey was actually tipped by an Eagles player, sending the kick leftward.

And folks began worrying about the safety of the kicker moments after he clanked the ball off the upright, like this Twitter user.

Though Parkey scored most of Chicago's points on Sunday — and a little more than half on the season — it didn't stop the social media posts.

And, of course, Cubs fans never forget.