Dan Bailey has a serious case of the yips and it could very well cost him his job with the Vikings.
Asked Monday afternoon if he anticipates Bailey being Minnesota’s kicker this Sunday in a matchup between the Vikings and Bears, head coach Mike Zimmer said “I haven’t made the decision yet.”
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow or Wednesday,” Zimmer said, noting that he prefers to “address the team about these things as opposed to throwing it out there in the media.”
The Vikings have a storied history of kicker failures, from Gary Anderson in 1998 to Blair Walsh in 2015, and just as glaring are draft picks and trades used to acquire kickers who didn’t last a full season before being booted off the team under Zimmer and General Manager Rick Spielman.
The Vikings used a fifth-round pick on Daniel Carlson in 2018 and then cut him after he missed a trio of kicks in an overtime loss to the Green Bay Packers. Carlson is now a very consistent kicker with the Las Vegas Raiders, having gone 26 of 28 on field goals this season and 38 of 39 on extra points.
In 2018, the Vikings traded the Ravens a fifth-round pick for kicker Kaare Vedvik, only to cut Vedvik before the start of the regular season.
Bailey was rock-solid for the Vikings last season, hitting on 27 of 29 field goals, though he did miss four extra points. This season the wheels have come off the veteran kicker as he missed three field goals and an extra point in Minnesota’s loss to the Buccaneers on Sunday, which came a week after he missed a pair of extra points and a long field goal against the Panthers.
For the season, Bailey has converted just 12 of 18 field goals and 27 of 31 extra points.
