HOPES CHICAGO IS FOG-FREE TONIGHT
This year and last year, though, not so much. To call it perplexing is to understate the truth. And this season, Akers has been in the middle of everything. Big, controversial, gut-wrenching moments have chased him. Unfortunately for him and for the Eagles, there is nothing boring about David Akers anymore.
The half. It is where we begin, then, with a blocked field goal returned for a touchdown. If the 3-3 Eagles get this thing turned around, it will be remembered as the start of the sequence that nearly killed and ultimately saved their season.
And Akers was in the middle of that, too.
"It feels unbelievable," he said, about the whole crazy day. "I'm just going to keep swinging the best that I can. People made fun of my joke when I said I'm a blessed man and the sun is going to come up tomorrow. Today is my daughter's fourth birthday and I'm missing it out here. I feel that I'm going to keep working at it.
"It feels good today, to win the way we did. It showed a lot of character on the team, to keep battling. That was a huge momentum switch."
To the half, then. To the last play of the half. The Eagles were holding a 17-9 lead and had maneuvered the ball downfield and put Akers in a position to try a 54-yard field goal at the gun.
It seemed an ideal attempt for a kicker struggling to make long kicks. It was long enough to be makable but still so long that nobody really had any great expectations. If Akers missed, it would have been no big deal. If he succeeded, maybe it would be salve for whatever has been ailing him.
"I felt like I was going to drill it," he said. "I made it from 64 [yards] in warm-ups that way. I felt like I really struck the ball well - I mean, I had a lot of power to it."
Make? Miss? Either would have been fine. But the third possibility - that the kick would be blocked by the 49ers' Ray McDonald and returned for a touchdown by Donald Strickland - was the long shot that came in instead, stunning the Eagles. And when the 49ers came out and took the lead at the start of the third quarter, this team and this season were both in a bit of jeopardy.
It would have been a stunning way to lose. And it would have been devastating for Akers, who already was living with a couple of tough misses in the loss to Chicago. He is the Eagles in many ways, and his season is their season. To fold up there would have been awful. The challenge was squarely before them.
"This whole season, I think, has been a battle of ups and downs," Akers said.
"We've been having the good plays and the bad plays. I just feel, when I'm out there, I'm going to give it my best shot. As you saw what the rest of the team did, there was no quit in them. I'm proud to be around these guys.
"It shows something, to come back the way we did," he said.
The 38-yarder, on a windy day at Candlestick Park, was crucial. The wind at Soldier Field in Chicago had bedeviled Akers a couple of weeks back. His leg looks fine but something has been missing - and, that night, it was a miscalculation on the wind. This time, there would be a different calculation.
"I overplayed the wind a couple of weeks ago," he said. "This time I just aimed it right down the middle and said, 'Let's go.' "
The officials under the uprights signaled the kick was good, that the ball was inside the right upright. But it was close, and 49ers coach Mike Nolan challenged. Unfortunately for him, you can't challenge a kick that is higher than the uprights - that's a judgment call, but the only way to find out if it is higher than the uprights is to challenge anyway.
Whatever, the kick was good. For his part, Akers said he really wasn't worried. And he says he's trying not to get too excited about this good, stabilizing day for him - "Because anything can happen, you now? It's a game of inches, as you see . . .
"It stinks to miss kicks, to be honest with you. Whether it's a 19-yarder or a 58-yarder, it still goes down as a miss. If it's off a pole or if it's 15 yards wide, it doesn't matter, either. Every attempt, it's in my head that I just want to go out and make this kick. The 54-yarder, I felt really confident, going out and making it . . . I really felt like we were just going to mash it and get it through there."
But he didn't. As it turned out, what happened after mattered even more. *
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