TAMPA, Fla. — If lips could be read through a mask, you can imagine what Mike Zimmer might’ve been muttering Sunday as he watched Dan Bailey miss four kicks, give away 10 points and all but harpooned the Vikings’ chances of upsetting the favored Buccaneers in Tampa. Outside the mask, his hardened demeanor portrayed a man calloused by the spirits of kickers past.
Zimmer has witnessed implosions of all kinds in his seven years as Vikings head coach. He’s watched young kickers like Daniel Carlson and Kaare Vedvik unravel before their careers even got off the ground. He’s seen a season go down the tubes thanks to an easy miss by Blair Walsh, followed by half a season of Walsh gradually unspooling. Now he’s witnessed another acute unraveling by Bailey, a seven-misses-in-two-weeks avalanche from a player that once ranked in the top five most accurate kickers in history.
Like Carlson’s collapse — a three-miss performance in his second career game — Bailey’s incomprehensible stretch carries the stigma of volume. It’s one thing to atrophy one missed kick at a time; it’s another to miss a season’s worth of kicks in one day. But it also carries shades of Walsh. Like him, Bailey was a veteran, costs more than the average kicker and has a generally positive history with the organization. Typically, that buys a player some time, and that’s why Zimmer confidently declared Friday that Bailey would “be fine.”
Bailey was 36 of 39 on placekicks before Week 13’s game vs. the Jacksonville Jaguars where he missed two extra points and a field goal, but Bailey had never missed more than three combined kicks in consecutive games. History was on his side for a bounceback, and Bailey declared that his timing and ball-striking had been great in practice all week. That’s what made Sunday so alarming. A fluttering mishit left on the first extra point likely set off warning signs. Then a push to right — perhaps an overcompensation — on the ensuing 36-yard field goal attempt opened the floodgates. Bailey was then asked minutes later to try a 54-yard field goal, a confidence builder if he’d made it, but it wound up slicing hard to the right like a bad golf shot, missing the net entirely. It was almost preordained that Bailey would miss his final attempt of 46 yards, once again pushing the ball beyond the right upright. For the first time in nearly 60 years, a kicker missed at least one extra point and three field goals without making any.
“I’m really disappointed,” Zimmer said. “I have a lot of faith in him, I have a lot of confidence in him. But these last two weeks have not been good. I love the kid, he’s a great kid, he’s very even-natured. I don’t know.”
Compiled Mike Zimmer’s comments about Dan Bailey in the postgame. Should be an interesting week at TCO.#Vikings pic.twitter.com/EE2PSUShQI
— Sam Ekstrom (@SamEkstrom) December 13, 2020
The head coach did not say definitively that the Vikings would keep Bailey, which speaks volumes about his tenuous future with the club, though Zimmer did assert that he can’t “fire” every player that makes mistakes. He’s right about that, but kickers are different creatures. They have a role crucial to the team’s success, but no backup to spell them if they struggle.
To their chagrin the Vikings have ample experience handling these situations. With Carlson and Vedvik, their leash was short, and in both cases Bailey was the beneficiary. Following Carlson’s flameout, the Vikings picked up Bailey in free agency after he lost a kicking competition in Dallas. Vedvik came on to challenge Bailey in the 2019 preseason but struggled in live action, which enabled Bailey to hang onto his job. Ironically, the Vikings’ quick hook may cost Bailey this time. Minnesota has three games to go and essentially needs to win all three for a shot at the playoffs. Missed kicks won’t be tolerated.
“At this point in time, we’re not really worried about feelings anymore,” said Zimmer, aware of the direness of the situation.
Sometimes, there is no logic to kicking mishaps. Bailey had one of his best seasons in 2019 despite a new special teams coordinator, new kicking coach, new holder and new longsnapper, posting a 93% success rate on field goals. With all those pieces still intact in 2020, Bailey was duplicating that effort for three-quarters of the year.
In Week 11, the Vikings benched longsnapper Austin Cutting and turned to Andrew DePaola as their special teams units crumbled around Bailey — the lone constant. Zimmer was concerned that Cutting’s snaps were a liability on placekicks; now he’d probably give his left arm to go back to the way things were. There’s no indication DePaola has been a problem, though, and holder Britton Colquitt has given Bailey every opportunity to make his kicks. But kickers can be like the finicky antenna on the old-school TV: You need to hold them in just the right place to get perfect reception, and right now Bailey is getting static.
“I don’t know right now,” Zimmer said. “He kicked good during the week this week. So we’ll just have to make a decision and go with it. I like the kid a lot. Like I said before, I’ve had tons of confidence in him.”
There are several factors at play besides Bailey’s performance. One is his salary, which pays him over $2 million even if he’s released. That’s a lot of dead money for a kicker in a time when every penny lost hurts the 2021 cap situation. The Vikings ran into a similar situation with Walsh, who was owed $3.75 million guaranteed but was released in the first year of his four-year extension. Bailey’s contract runs through 2022.
COVID-19 is also a complicator. Minnesota would have a tough time getting a free agent kicker in the building in time for their Week 15 game because of testing protocols. That leaves only practice squad kicker Tristan Vizcaino, who hasn’t kicked in a regular season game in the NFL and played his final college season in 2017. If Minnesota wants to explore Vizcaino as an option, the Vikings can treat the situation the same as they did with their longsnappers. Because of new practice squad call-up rules, Minnesota could elevate Vizcaino to the active roster two weeks in a row without subjecting him to waivers. They could bench Bailey without cutting him and reevaluate in Week 17. If the game means nothing, then there would be no harm in giving Bailey another shot. If it has playoff implications, they’ll need to make a decision.
Special teams drama has shadowed the Vikings for years and is threatening to steal the headlines at a critical juncture of the season. Zimmer will have to decide the cost of chasing wins in the short-term, which is no guarantee with a new kicker. Moving on from Bailey may eliminate an immediate problem, but it potentially sets the table for another offseason of special teams carousels, which have rarely promoted stability.
But unprecedented events often call for rapid action.
“It’s frustrating in the sense that you put in all this work,” Bailey said the Friday before the game. “I feel like I’ve been hitting the ball well – not only in practice but during the season – so to go out there and perform that way [in Week 13] was a little frustrating, obviously. For myself and everybody else, too, I’m sure. But you have to just put it behind you. You have to find a way to reset as quick as you can.”
Bailey can’t press the reset button on his day in Tampa Bay, and his future is in flux as Zimmer weighs his options.
