CHARLOTTE — This was a big weekend for Eddy Piñeiro, even if he barely got off the couch.

Sure, there was that "record" he set while not even playing. But for the Panthers kicker, being at home in Florida with his family made it one to remember.

He went home to visit with his father, Eddy Sr., who recently suffered a heart attack. Because of that, his dad wasn't able to go to Germany to see him hit a game-winner in overtime, so getting to catch up was as significant as anything he didn't really do on Sunday.

"Just hung out with the family," he said with a grin when asked about his weekend. "Went down to Miami. I hung out with my dad.

"Dad's doing good. Went to his doctor's appointment. He's doing well, thank God."

Since that was on the front of his mind, Piñeiro didn't realize until later that he achieved a unique distinction during a week he wasn't playing.

When Baltimore's Justin Tucker missed a pair of field goals against the Steelers yesterday, it dropped his career accuracy mark to 89.348 percent (411-of-460).

That left Piñeiro, at home with his family in Miami, with his 89.381 mark (101-of-113) at the top of the list.

For a guy whose last kick was an overtime game-winner, it was an unusual way to move up the rankings, though no one, including Piñeiro, is making this more than it is.

"I would definitely rather get it hitting a kick or something, obviously not on somebody else's downfall," Piñeiro said. "But at the end of the day, Justin Tucker is the greatest of all time. From the amount of kicks that he's kicked and I've kicked, he's kicked four times the amount of kicks that I've kicked. And to stay at that level, him being a seven-time Pro Bowler, I mean, there's no question.

"He's the greatest of all time."

The law of big numbers does dictate that Piñeiro's percentage can fluctuate more with any one kick than Tucker's, but Tucker has consistently put up big numbers.

In his career, the Ravens kicker is 61-of-92 on kicks of 50 yards or longer.

Piñeiro has only attempted 13 such kicks in his career (making 11).

Long snapper JJ Jansen said Piñeiro mentioned that immediately when they discussed it over breakfast Monday.

"When I got in, the first person I saw was Johnny Hekker , and I turned to Johnny and I said, do you think he knows?" Jansen said with a grin. "And Johnny looked at me with kind of a wry smile, and he said, 'I think he knows, I think he knows.' Eddy is like a lot of kickers: very competitive and very aware of what's going on around the league. It's just kind of that position, and everyone's kind of comparing themselves, and it's how all those guys stay motivated.

"So an opportunity to get up and into that upper echelon, whether it be number one or over 90 percent for her career, all those different things, they're always looking for extra motivation. And so this is just another example of that."

But Piñeiro — again, distracted by seeing his father recovering well from a recent health scare — said he didn't realize it until some friends alerted him to posts on social media.

"One of my friends tagged me in a post or something, and I was like, oh, OK," he said. "And then everybody started tagging me in different things. And I was like, 'Oh, wow. I guess it's legit then.'"

Piñeiro said he was enjoying the "positive feedback" he's gotten on Monday, but the 29-year-old still carries the scars of a life in a volatile business. He used to wonder if he'd get another chance to be a starter after his first season in Chicago in 2019. He played in five games in the next two seasons combined before an injury opened the door for him here in 2021, and he's hit 90.9 percent of his field goals since (70-of-77).

"I feel like I'm just one kick away from not being in the NFL, and that's the mindset that I just bring into it," he said. "Like, I'm one kick away from going home, and unfortunately, that's just the way it is with kickers, you know. But this year has been awesome so far; we've worked very hard to get to this point. So I'm just really happy and grateful that I was able to have the opportunity."

He keeps making the most of them. And the fact that his last kick went so well doesn't hurt either, and head coach Dave Canales said he used the German game-winner as an example to other players.

"Just the consistency; he shows up and does the same thing every day," Canales said. "We ask those guys to kick on the skinnies (narrower goalposts) in practice, and those tight field goals; he does a really good job striking those. But it was just his approach; it didn't matter that it was to win the game, it was his same approach to the ball. They used the time out; he just went right back through his routine.

"And I love that; I love being able to point to that to the team, to say guys go through your process, play-to-play, just go through the normal process, and then those fundamentals and that approach will take care of you regardless of what the situation is. The bigger the moments, the smaller the focus. Just focus on your fundamentals and then execute. So I love that Eddie was able to get that done for us in Germany."