Cleveland Browns pick-a-player: Adding one free agent from each NFC North team

Chicago Bears – Cairo Santos, Kicker

Wow-what an absolutely terrible list, it has a kicker on it. Yeah, sorry, kickers and punters are people too and I haven’t given them any love so far in this series so here it is. Yes, I know Allen Robinson is available but the offense doesn’t desperately need another weapon. The Browns do however desperately need a new kicker, enter Cairo Santos.

Cody Parkey wasn’t absolutely terrible this season, but he progressively got worse as the season went on and you could tell that he knew it too. Thankfully, it didn’t end up costing the Browns in the playoffs but it did end up potentially altering the results of the Raiders game and the second Ravens game.

Had Parkey made his kicks then there would have been different decisions made down the road in those games, which could have led to wins. Cairo Santos made 93.8 percent of his field goals and 97.3 percent of his point-after attempts, both higher than Parkey.

He is an instant upgrade at a position that is absolutely vital to a team’s success. Kicking can make or break a team as we saw in the regular season. Santos has had an up and down career so far, bouncing around the league to five different teams, landing in Chicago for the second time in his career before having his bounce-back season. If he can continue to perform as he did in 2020 then that solves the Browns special teams issues and is one less thing to worry about.

Signing a former Chicago Bears kicker… sounds familiar.