For the first day, the Cowboy alum practice just as a punter, while eight other kicker hopefuls made a mess of Chicago’s ultimate test of trying to nail – you guessed it – a pressure-packed 43-yard field goal during practice. Only two succeeded. The next day, Kjellsten jumped into the placekicker mix and was one of the most accurate during the day.
Kjellsten said the process felt almost like a combine for kickers, measuring everything from the exact apex of the kick to analyzing the minuscule elements of how the ball rotated in the air off his foot.
“They brought in something like 14 specialists, and the organization did a great job of constructing pressure situations for us, and it was very competitive,” he said. “Every kick was charted, and they had all this technology on the goalpost.
“Then, at the end of practice, they had all the kickers line up, and everyone was standing on the 50-yard-line. It was silent, like you could have heard a pin drop. Every kick held a lot of weight – even if you made the kick, if the ball wasn’t rotating the right way or if it knocked off the upright and then went in, it was no good to them.”
In the end, the Bears kept just two kickers and then traded a future conditional seventh-round pick to Oakland for Eddy Pineiro, so Kjellsten packed his bags off to the next stop to a locker room where both the team’s kicker and punter are very well-established, alongside ballyhooed LSU kicker Cole Tracy.
