Kickers. Football kickers. There's just something about kickers that separates them from their teammates. It seems like they play a different sport than the rest of the football team. The rest of the team wallows in the trenches and busts heads -- and then the kicker comes out and swings his leg when all is said and done. It's the position that allows us regular guys to claim we're on the football team when we're hitting on girls in bars. Without the kicker, we'd get laughed at. Maybe we still do, but there's a glimmer of hope.
Kickers also have given us some of football's best comic relief over the course of the history of the game. From Garo Yepremian's misguided pass attempt in Super Bowl VII to Bill Gramatica's tearing his ACL in celebration last season, it seems like kickers have only two ways to get in the public eye -- either to win the game or embarrass themselves trying.
That's why they talk to the media so rarely. Until the past few weeks, the only NFL kickers that most of us can remember hearing from are Adam Vinatieri and Scott Norwood. That's a pretty good indication of the life of a kicker -- feast or famine. Unless a guy pulls a Vinatieri and splits the uprights with the winning kick in the Super Bowl, he should be seen and not heard.
That's a lesson that evidently escaped Mike Vanderjagt last week. The Indianapolis Colts' kicker put his kicking foot in his mouth and then some when he decided to badmouth two of the guys who were the reasons the Colts made it as far as they did: head coach Tony Dungy and quarterback Peyton Manning.
Vanderjagt made his idiotic comments in an interview with Toronto sports network, The Score, saying, "I'm not a big Colts fan right now, unfortunately. I just don't see us getting better." He went on to claim that Dungy and Manning lacked the intensity needed to win a Super Bowl title.
For starters, dissing Dungy was poor form. Last year, he was coaching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He then leaves to take the Indianapolis job, gets waxed in the playoffs and has to watch Jon Gruden take his former team to a Super Bowl championship. Vanderjagt may simply be conditioned to kick everything he sees, but you just don't kick a guy when he's down. And especially not if that guy is in charge of determining your livelihood -- a distinction that evidently escaped Vanderjagt.
As for Manning, talking trash about Archie's older son may be in style right now, but the fact remains that if you had put him in Brad Johnson's uniform this season, the Bucs still would have lifted the Lombardi trophy in San Diego. The Bucs won the championship because of their defense -- a unit that was built largely by Dungy. Meanwhile, the man who brought Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks, Ronde Barber and John Lynch together gets to pick up the pieces left behind by Jim "Playoffs?" Mora.
Maybe Vanderjagt has forgotten the Colts' recent playoff failures, the ones that came while Dungy was perfecting his Cover 2. Evidently the kicker got attached to the man who made the expression "diddly-poo" a part of football vernacular.
Either way, Vanderjagt was out of line with his comments. There's a reason that kickers -- even those as clutch as Vinatieri -- rarely get votes for awards like Super Bowl MVP. Who can name the last four kickers for Super Bowl champions before Vinatieri's kick? If you guessed Matt Stover, Jeff Wilkins, Jason Elam and Ryan Longwell, pat yourself on the back, but the fact remains that these guys really didn't have that big of an impact on the game. And they are Super Bowl champions -- an honor that Vanderjagt will never reach if he continues to badmouth the real engines behind the team that has taken him to the playoffs three of the past four seasons.
Whether Vanderjagt can patch things up with Manning -- who aptly returned fire, calling his placekicker "an idiot" -- and Dungy remains to be seen. What you can count on, however, is the Indianapolis Colts making it to the playoffs next season, with or without Vanderjagt. Dungy and Manning will be there, adding to their impressive resumes. Manning is capable of winning the Super Bowl. Dungy is capable of building a championship team -- he already did just that in Tampa. And let's be honest, Mike Vanderjagt is a top-caliber kicker. In fact, he's the most accurate kicker in NFL history. But there are plenty of other kickers out there who could help the Colts win the Super Bowl. After the past week, no one could blame them if they decide to try their luck with another one.
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