NEW ORLEANS _ Joey Slye isn't the first guy to find himself on a flight home after a weekend full of indiscretions in New Orleans wondering if he'll still have a job in the morning.
He said he wasn't worried about his job security, and Carolina Panthers coach Ron Rivera talked about how this could be a learning experience for him. But NFL kickers who miss extra points and would-be go-ahead chip shots have the shelf life of bruised fruit, and everyone around him knew it.
In a season that was excruciating enough already for the Panthers, Slye's 28-yard miss with two minutes to go and the score tied was a newly painful blow. The Saints drove to the other end of the field and made a short field goal of their own for the 34-31 win the Panthers thought they had secured, but for the wayward right foot of their rookie kicker.
Between the late miss and two missed extra points _ all wide to the right _ Slye personally left enough points on the table to be the single, human difference between winning and losing.
"The obvious statement is the loss I feel like is on me," Slye said. "I'll take ownership of that and get back to work next week."
It's never as simple as that, and there were enough mistakes made elsewhere amid a Panthers performance that was otherwise inspired, but that's also the life of a kicker. Another player can make a dozen mistakes over the course of four quarters and no one notices. Slye made three and they cost the Panthers the game.
"It's a tough business, a tough game," Greg Olsen said. The Panthers' tight end has seen enough kickers come and go in his career to know when things are likely to lean toward the latter.
Under normal circumstances, Slye would be looking for a taxi and the Panthers would be looking for kickers to audition Monday. But with Graham Gano expected back next season and the Panthers' playoff chances having been pounded into gumbo by last week's inexplicable no-show against the Falcons and this incomprehensible loss to the Saints, they may have nothing to lose by letting Slye kick out the string.
That's the impression Rivera left Sunday, not that he was going to fire the kid from the interview podium, anyway.
"He's going to make some that help us win," Rivera said. "That's the thing he's got to understand. This is all part of it. Let's not forget this is really his first year. He's a young kicker, he's going to make his mistakes, and if you give him time and stick with him eventually he's going to become a good kicker."
But there's also the inescapable reality of professional football, which is that unreliable kickers are the most replaceable of parts. Slye came into training camp as a long-shot insurance policy in case Gano wasn't ready, then kicked well enough in the preseason to be the obvious replacement when Gano shut it down. His big leg has been a weapon, going 12-for-18 from 40 yards and out and connecting from 41 and 52 yards Sunday. That made his short-range yips all the more baffling.
"This isn't unusual in the course of an NFL season or an NFL career to have a bad game, one that feels like a gut punch," long-snapper J.J. Jansen said. "There's nothing I can say in the moment. Perhaps as time goes by, I can provide some perspective, how we bounce back from this. That's the role of a veteran player."
Even after the missed extra points, one in the first quarter, one in the third, Slye still had the game on his foot coming out of the two-minute warning. It probably shouldn't have come to that _ the Panthers ran five plays from inside the 10-yard line without scoring _ but it did.
According to the NFL's own stats, Slye had a 93.5% chance of making that one. It turned out to be the highest probability of any field goal missed in the NFL this entire season, a gimme in everything but execution.
"It looks pretty stupid when I miss to say I felt confident, but every one of those kicks I went into with the same mind-set," Slye said. "The results are obviously different."
The miss was shrouded in controversy, with Jansen claiming he was pulled down by Marcus Davenport as Davenport hurdled him and landed in Slye's face. The officials conferred and decided it wasn't a penalty; Slye said he never saw Davenport, anyway, only the kick veering off to the right as he lifted his head.
"You don't want to win because a specialist screws up," said Saints kicker Will Lutz, who didn't miss at the other end moments later. "It's hard to swallow, as a specialist, to see him go through that."
Long after it was all over, after quarterback Kyle Allen had walked with him off the field, after Slye had changed into a black Panthers sweatsuit, the kicker sat in his locker and pulled a yellow notebook out of his bag. With a red pen, he painstakingly added another half page of notes to a page already half-full of scribbled text. He tucked the notebook into a Virginia Tech backpack and finished packing his luggage. Then he walked out of the locker room and into the unknown.
