The Vikings face the Seahawks on Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium, the first time Minnesota will host Seattle since that fateful playoff game where Blair Walsh missed wide left from 27 yards.
Can Vikings kicker Greg Joseph keep one bad miss from becoming more?
Host Michael Rand welcomed Stefan Fatsis, author of "A Few Seconds of Panic," onto Friday's Daily Delivery podcast for a kicking discussion.
September 24, 2021 at 5:48PM
So of course this game comes right after the Vikings' newest kicker, Greg Joseph, missed a 37-yarder wide right that would have given Minnesota a win over Arizona.
Walsh never fully recovered from that playoff game. He missed four field goals and four extra points in nine games the next year before the Vikings moved on. He missed nine more kicks for Seattle in 2017 and hasn't tried a kick in the NFL since. The Vikings have had a rotating cast of characters before and since then, which has been well-documented.
The question now for the 0-2 Vikings and their relatively inexperienced kicker is this: Do they have the confidence that the next big kick, and most of them going forward, will be made and not missed?
To help get into that, I welcomed Stefan Fatsis onto Friday's Daily Delivery podcast. He's the author of "A Few Seconds of Panic," a book for which he spent part of a training camp with the Broncos as a would-be kicker and learned a lot about the league — and the psychology of kicking — along the way.
As Fatsis notes, kickers don't practice the same as other players. They are often treated as outsiders even by their teammates. Their plays in a game are different because all eyes are on them, make or miss, which magnifies mistakes to a greater extent than say Dalvin Cook's overtime fumble in Week 1.
And for as much as there is a physical component to kicking a ball, the mental side of kicking is significantly more important.
"Failure can't be the last thing you think about," Fatsis said. "You have to come up with some sort of process to get it out of your brain and out of your body. I'm sure that Greg Joseph has that. Every kicker has that. ... But still, getting to that happy place isn't always automatic. You miss one and it can lead to another miss. The best kickers are able to flush it instantly."
Walsh couldn't quite seem to do that. Daniel Carlson, cut by the Vikings after missing three field goals in Week 2 of the 2018 season, has gone on to succeed with the Raiders.
What will Joseph's fate be? We might get some of that answer Sunday.
When he was hired after the disastrous 2016 season to reshape the Twins, Derek Falvey brought a reputation for identifying and developing pitching talent. It took a while, but the pipeline we were promised is now materializing.
