Angus
Active Member
- Messages
- 5,097
- Reaction score
- 20
A Career in Need of a Kick-Start
After Getting Cut by the Cowboys Last Season, Vanderjagt Has Yet to Catch On With Another Team
By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 1, 2007; E10
The other day, if for nothing else than to prove there still is magic in his right foot, Mike Vanderjagt walked onto the soccer field at Mackle Park in Marco Island, Fla., stepped off the 55 yards that were his customary limit for guaranteed perfection, set up a tee and began kicking footballs. It was a simplistic ritual, one he normally would be completing on a sweltering afternoon at an NFL training camp. Yet this time, with nothing but palm trees and the Gulf of Mexico around, Vanderjagt said he had to settle for a soccer goal to suffice as a crossbar.
He took 32 kicks from those 55 yards and said he made all 32 of them. "It got kind of boring after a while," Vanderjagt said.
At this moment, he was on his cellphone with his son in the car in what seemed an entirely incongruous late-summer scene: the NFL's most accurate field goal kicker running errands on a day in which he should have been preparing for his 10th NFL season. But something has happened to Mike Vanderjagt. He has turned radioactive and he isn't sure why. Ever since Bill Parcells released him from the Dallas Cowboys last Nov. 27, Vanderjagt has become almost forgotten. The phone doesn't ring. He is not besieged with offers. His shoes go unused. Abandoned at age 37, even though it's clear he probably has several more good years left.
"Every day somebody comes up to me and says: 'You're the best-ever kicker. How come you aren't playing with anyone?' I always say, 'Don't ask me,' " Vanderjagt said. Then he paused and gave a dry laugh.
"I guess it's sort of embarrassing when no one wants you."
Vanderjagt can't ignore the irony. He sees football players being arrested and going to court, then getting second and third and fourth chances, and he wonders what he did so wrong to be put on the NFL's do-not-call list. In his first eight NFL seasons, when he played for the Indianapolis Colts, he made making field goals so routine it almost seemed as if he were kicking extra points. It looked that easy. Then came the miss against the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2005-06 playoffs, the Colts' decision to sign Adam Vinatieri and Vanderjagt's signing with Dallas last spring, when his three-year, $5.5 million contract with a $2.5 million signing bonus was one of the bigger deals ever for a kicker.
That's when things got bad. He missed part of training camp with a groin injury and was deactivated for the Cowboys' first two games even though he said he was fine. And in the 10 games he did play for Dallas, he missed four field goals and had another one blocked against the Washington Commanders when nobody picked up Troy Vincent, who barely let the ball get into the air.
But he still hit on 72 percent of his field goals, which was well below his 86.5 career success rate but nonetheless the envy of many place kickers in the NFL. So why has no one called? Was it something he said? Did he offend someone? He really doesn't know.
There are a lot of kickers in the league who missed 10 field goals last year and signed big contracts in the offseason. This confuses him.
"I really think I'm held to a different standard," he said.
Yes he is aware of his reputation as a kicker too prone to say silly things. He, of course, is notorious for criticizing Colts quarterback Peyton Manning and Coach Tony Dungy on a Canadian television station for not showing enough fire, which led to Manning's response at the 2003 Pro Bowl, when he called Vanderjagt "an idiot kicker who got liquored up."
Asked if he thought the Manning incident still is fresh in people's memories and hurts him, Vanderjagt said, "If you're still asking the question, it must be."
Manning, he said, has his number programmed into his cellphone. Dungy remains a friend. Edgerrin James, the Colts running back when Vanderjagt was there, is a partner with him in a restaurant in Marco Island that they call Vandy's With an Edge. Wide receiver Reggie Wayne is a good friend who often sends him text messages wondering about Vanderjagt's lack of job possibilities, always asking the same question: "How the hell is this going on?"
Vanderjagt prides himself on these friendships, on the fact he is not what he likes to call "a quirky kicker" who doesn't fit in with the rough-and-tumble football players. He is 6 feet 5, and to just see him standing from the back in uniform you would probably think he was a quarterback or wide receiver.
"I'm the guy who comes in and does his job, kicks field goals and goes home," Vanderjagt said. "I'm not that quirky kicker who you can't talk to with two minutes left in the game. It's okay, come on over. I'll shoot the breeze."
He thinks a team would want someone like that. He always was certain in those moments, always thinking of himself a little like Tiger Woods. People would ask how Woods could look so calm in the most perilous of times, and Woods said it was easy once he knew he could hit the ball straight down the fairway every time he teed off. To Vanderjagt, kicking was much the same thing: line up the ball and kick it down the middle.
Does the NFL think he has lost that fearlessness? When Parcells released him, the coach used words such as "confidence," and it was always hard to decipher in Parcells's words whether he had lost confidence in Vanderjagt or if he thought Vanderjagt had lost confidence in himself.
Then again, maybe Dallas was a lost cause. "It seemed like a ridiculous situation," Vanderjagt said. The team had gone through a number of kickers in the previous two seasons, and owner Jerry Jones seemed engaged in an endless power struggle with Parcells, who never appeared to warm to Vanderjagt.
Did Vanderjagt lose his nerve? The misses, going back to his last playoff game with Indianapolis, all were to the right. This would scream "mechanical flaw," but Vanderjagt couldn't figure it out. He is not one for film study, relying on muscle memory and a self-assuredness that has gotten him through his career. It wasn't until this summer, when he was kicking one afternoon, that the problem hit him. He was pulling up too fast after the kick to watch the ball. He adjusted, and the ball started going right back down the middle again. This is how he fixes things. Maybe it's unconventional in a league that is all about order. But it has worked for him.
There were brief expressions of interest from a small handful of NFL teams. The New York Giants brought him in for a workout but chose not to sign him. The New Orleans Saints seemed a good possibility, and Vanderjagt was excited about the chance to kick for a team built around offense that expects to score lots of points, but the request came at a time when he was still preparing to move from his home outside Toronto down to Florida. He had not kicked much and had not yet come to his epiphany about why some of his kicks went wide right. He fears he missed more kicks than the Saints' people wanted to see. They traded for Olindo Mare instead.
A couple of other teams asked at the end of last season for him to come in and kick on a week-to-week basis, but Vanderjagt does not want that. He is the most successful kicker in the history of the game. He bounced from team to team during his first few professional years in the Canadian Football League. He doesn't need that now.
"I'm not going to be a journey kicker," he said. He added that he would be happy to take his 86.5 career field goal percentage, stay in Florida and know he had a great career. Then maybe in a year he would go back to Canada, find a team and kick there for fun. He wouldn't have the same fame as he would in the NFL and the money wouldn't be as good, but he's had a lot of fame and he's made a lot of money. His family is happy, they just enrolled their 8-year-old son in school and are prepared to bask in the sun every day.
"If [the NFL] doesn't happen that's fine, I don't care," Vanderjagt said. "I had a great career. I'll just play golf and get my handicap down."
Yet even as he said the words, which he repeated at least three times in a half-hour interview, they sounded empty, as if he was trying to convince himself they were true. There are too many good years left. He is sure of it.
These next few days are a hard time for teams and their kickers. Field goals made in preseason games have a way of going awry in the regular season. There will be cuts, searches for new kickers. Vanderjagt cannot believe the phone will sit silent forever; neither does his agent, Gil Scott. He feels he proved last season that he could kick off, something he hadn't done in Indianapolis. He is certain he will be great again.
After all, the most accurate kicker in the NFL can't be the champion of Mackle Park forever.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/31/AR2007083102146_pf.html
After Getting Cut by the Cowboys Last Season, Vanderjagt Has Yet to Catch On With Another Team
By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 1, 2007; E10
The other day, if for nothing else than to prove there still is magic in his right foot, Mike Vanderjagt walked onto the soccer field at Mackle Park in Marco Island, Fla., stepped off the 55 yards that were his customary limit for guaranteed perfection, set up a tee and began kicking footballs. It was a simplistic ritual, one he normally would be completing on a sweltering afternoon at an NFL training camp. Yet this time, with nothing but palm trees and the Gulf of Mexico around, Vanderjagt said he had to settle for a soccer goal to suffice as a crossbar.
He took 32 kicks from those 55 yards and said he made all 32 of them. "It got kind of boring after a while," Vanderjagt said.
At this moment, he was on his cellphone with his son in the car in what seemed an entirely incongruous late-summer scene: the NFL's most accurate field goal kicker running errands on a day in which he should have been preparing for his 10th NFL season. But something has happened to Mike Vanderjagt. He has turned radioactive and he isn't sure why. Ever since Bill Parcells released him from the Dallas Cowboys last Nov. 27, Vanderjagt has become almost forgotten. The phone doesn't ring. He is not besieged with offers. His shoes go unused. Abandoned at age 37, even though it's clear he probably has several more good years left.
"Every day somebody comes up to me and says: 'You're the best-ever kicker. How come you aren't playing with anyone?' I always say, 'Don't ask me,' " Vanderjagt said. Then he paused and gave a dry laugh.
"I guess it's sort of embarrassing when no one wants you."
Vanderjagt can't ignore the irony. He sees football players being arrested and going to court, then getting second and third and fourth chances, and he wonders what he did so wrong to be put on the NFL's do-not-call list. In his first eight NFL seasons, when he played for the Indianapolis Colts, he made making field goals so routine it almost seemed as if he were kicking extra points. It looked that easy. Then came the miss against the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2005-06 playoffs, the Colts' decision to sign Adam Vinatieri and Vanderjagt's signing with Dallas last spring, when his three-year, $5.5 million contract with a $2.5 million signing bonus was one of the bigger deals ever for a kicker.
That's when things got bad. He missed part of training camp with a groin injury and was deactivated for the Cowboys' first two games even though he said he was fine. And in the 10 games he did play for Dallas, he missed four field goals and had another one blocked against the Washington Commanders when nobody picked up Troy Vincent, who barely let the ball get into the air.
But he still hit on 72 percent of his field goals, which was well below his 86.5 career success rate but nonetheless the envy of many place kickers in the NFL. So why has no one called? Was it something he said? Did he offend someone? He really doesn't know.
There are a lot of kickers in the league who missed 10 field goals last year and signed big contracts in the offseason. This confuses him.
"I really think I'm held to a different standard," he said.
Yes he is aware of his reputation as a kicker too prone to say silly things. He, of course, is notorious for criticizing Colts quarterback Peyton Manning and Coach Tony Dungy on a Canadian television station for not showing enough fire, which led to Manning's response at the 2003 Pro Bowl, when he called Vanderjagt "an idiot kicker who got liquored up."
Asked if he thought the Manning incident still is fresh in people's memories and hurts him, Vanderjagt said, "If you're still asking the question, it must be."
Manning, he said, has his number programmed into his cellphone. Dungy remains a friend. Edgerrin James, the Colts running back when Vanderjagt was there, is a partner with him in a restaurant in Marco Island that they call Vandy's With an Edge. Wide receiver Reggie Wayne is a good friend who often sends him text messages wondering about Vanderjagt's lack of job possibilities, always asking the same question: "How the hell is this going on?"
Vanderjagt prides himself on these friendships, on the fact he is not what he likes to call "a quirky kicker" who doesn't fit in with the rough-and-tumble football players. He is 6 feet 5, and to just see him standing from the back in uniform you would probably think he was a quarterback or wide receiver.
"I'm the guy who comes in and does his job, kicks field goals and goes home," Vanderjagt said. "I'm not that quirky kicker who you can't talk to with two minutes left in the game. It's okay, come on over. I'll shoot the breeze."
He thinks a team would want someone like that. He always was certain in those moments, always thinking of himself a little like Tiger Woods. People would ask how Woods could look so calm in the most perilous of times, and Woods said it was easy once he knew he could hit the ball straight down the fairway every time he teed off. To Vanderjagt, kicking was much the same thing: line up the ball and kick it down the middle.
Does the NFL think he has lost that fearlessness? When Parcells released him, the coach used words such as "confidence," and it was always hard to decipher in Parcells's words whether he had lost confidence in Vanderjagt or if he thought Vanderjagt had lost confidence in himself.
Then again, maybe Dallas was a lost cause. "It seemed like a ridiculous situation," Vanderjagt said. The team had gone through a number of kickers in the previous two seasons, and owner Jerry Jones seemed engaged in an endless power struggle with Parcells, who never appeared to warm to Vanderjagt.
Did Vanderjagt lose his nerve? The misses, going back to his last playoff game with Indianapolis, all were to the right. This would scream "mechanical flaw," but Vanderjagt couldn't figure it out. He is not one for film study, relying on muscle memory and a self-assuredness that has gotten him through his career. It wasn't until this summer, when he was kicking one afternoon, that the problem hit him. He was pulling up too fast after the kick to watch the ball. He adjusted, and the ball started going right back down the middle again. This is how he fixes things. Maybe it's unconventional in a league that is all about order. But it has worked for him.
There were brief expressions of interest from a small handful of NFL teams. The New York Giants brought him in for a workout but chose not to sign him. The New Orleans Saints seemed a good possibility, and Vanderjagt was excited about the chance to kick for a team built around offense that expects to score lots of points, but the request came at a time when he was still preparing to move from his home outside Toronto down to Florida. He had not kicked much and had not yet come to his epiphany about why some of his kicks went wide right. He fears he missed more kicks than the Saints' people wanted to see. They traded for Olindo Mare instead.
A couple of other teams asked at the end of last season for him to come in and kick on a week-to-week basis, but Vanderjagt does not want that. He is the most successful kicker in the history of the game. He bounced from team to team during his first few professional years in the Canadian Football League. He doesn't need that now.
"I'm not going to be a journey kicker," he said. He added that he would be happy to take his 86.5 career field goal percentage, stay in Florida and know he had a great career. Then maybe in a year he would go back to Canada, find a team and kick there for fun. He wouldn't have the same fame as he would in the NFL and the money wouldn't be as good, but he's had a lot of fame and he's made a lot of money. His family is happy, they just enrolled their 8-year-old son in school and are prepared to bask in the sun every day.
"If [the NFL] doesn't happen that's fine, I don't care," Vanderjagt said. "I had a great career. I'll just play golf and get my handicap down."
Yet even as he said the words, which he repeated at least three times in a half-hour interview, they sounded empty, as if he was trying to convince himself they were true. There are too many good years left. He is sure of it.
These next few days are a hard time for teams and their kickers. Field goals made in preseason games have a way of going awry in the regular season. There will be cuts, searches for new kickers. Vanderjagt cannot believe the phone will sit silent forever; neither does his agent, Gil Scott. He feels he proved last season that he could kick off, something he hadn't done in Indianapolis. He is certain he will be great again.
After all, the most accurate kicker in the NFL can't be the champion of Mackle Park forever.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/31/AR2007083102146_pf.html
