Feely: With opportunity, Catanzaro needed to come through

With 41 ticks left on the clock, Carson Palmer put the Cardinals into a position to get a game-winning field goal by connecting with Jaron Brown for an 18-yard strike.

Kicker Chandler Catanzaro was presented a chance to win the game with a 47-yard field goal. With less than a minute remaining and having no timeouts left, he would either be the hero or the goat.

On that night, he wasn’t the hero.

A poor snap from rookie long snapper Kameron Canaday led to the ball hitting the ground, but place holder Drew Butler salvaged the errant snap and had it ready to go for Catanzaro to boot Arizona to victory. The kick was off, but it was pulled way to the left, and that’s how the game ended.

As a kicker, you have one job, and that is to put the football between the uprights. When the kicker doesn’t do that, one has to wonder what is in the mind of a guy that wasn’t able deliver a win for his team.

Jay Feely, former Cardinals kicker who lost the kicking competition two years ago to Catanzaro, joined Doug and Wolf on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM, chimed in on the events that transpired on Sunday night.

The 13-year veteran said that bad snap or not, the kicker has to get it done.

“I always was of the mindset that you do your job, and that when you have the opportunity you need to come through, and if you have a game winner and you don’t make it, you stand up there, and I think he did as well, and take ownership of that,” Feely said.

Everyone in real time saw the snapper and holder struggle with the entire snap process. Catanzaro took an extra second to kick the ball, and timing plays an important role in kicking. The timing was thrown off that kick, and the kick wasn’t even close.

“No question the snap had an impact on the whole operation,” Feely said. “The hardest hold when you get a bad snap, happens when it’s outside and low, and that’s exactly what the snap was, outside and low, so you have to reach out and grab it and come back, but Drew Butler did a perfect job of getting the snap down.”

During the game leading up to the kick, the commentators were discussing Catanzaro’s range. His career-long was a 51-yarder his rookie season, but his longest last season was… You guessed it. 47 yards.

He knocked through a 59-yard field goal in the preseason against Oakland, but his range has not been nearly that effective during the regular season.

Is it all in his head? Was it just a fluke that he hit that 59-yarder? Feely explained what his thought process was before any of his kicks.

“I tried not to let my mind wonder, and I think that’s the biggest challenge for a kicker or a closer in baseball, somebody in that role where it’s just an individual job, and you start to think about the implications of what you’re doing,” Feely said. “You have to focus on something. You have to occupy your mind, and I would always focus on my fundamentals.”

How does a kicker recover from something like this?

There’s a saying in sports, that quarterbacks, pitchers, kickers, you name it, have to have a short memory after a disappointing performance. The difference between the good ones and the bad ones is the good do move the bad memories to the rear, and they focus on their next opportunity.

“The worst day, the absolute worst day after a missed field goal, is the next morning,” Feely said. “Walking in this morning into that locker room knowing that you had the opportunity to solve all the problems, all the problems with third-down and not getting pressure, all those things that reared their head, you had the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and get the win, and Monday would be great, and you didn’t do that, and now you walk in there and every time someone looks at you that’s what they’re thinking.”

Fans express their disgust for missed game-clinching kicks, and critics are all over them, but only kickers understand how it feels to let the other 52 men on the team down after missing a game-winning boot. As of now there are 15 more games, and there are more kicks that need to be made. The next time Catanzaro is put in this situation, maybe the short memory adage will have worked for the Cat-man.

“You go in there, you suck it up, you go through meetings, which the last thing you want to do his watch film because you know at some point you’re going to get to that missed field goal, then it’s over with,” Feely said.