Greg Joseph still has coach's support despite Vikings leading league in missed kicks

No one has missed more placekicks through five games than your Minnesota Vikings. Yet they're unscathed. They're 4-1, atop their division and sitting as the No. 2 seed in their conference.

Wow. Talk about changing the culture. This is more like an exorcism.

A tortured fan base still wincing 23 years after Gary Anderson's miss watched for eight seasons as poor Mike Zimmer was tormented annually from Blair Walsh's 27-yard duck hook in the 2015 playoffs to Daniel Carlson's triple-shank Lambeau latte in 2018 to Greg Joseph's last-second chip-shot miss that dropped last year's Vikings to 0-2 and became the beginning of the end of Zim's Purple employment.

Through five games a year ago, Joseph had three misses. The Vikings were 2-3. This year, Joseph has three misses in his past two games. The Vikings are 2-0 in those games with Joseph winning NFC special teams player of the week in a game in which he went 5-for-5 on field goals but still missed a PAT that kept the Saints within a field goal in the closing minutes.

Last year, Joseph was 7-for-9 on kicks of 50 yards or more. The Vikings finished 8-9. This year, Joseph is 1-for-5 with a blocked kick from 50-plus. Yet the Vikings keep winning as head exorcist, er, coach Kevin O'Connell keeps smiling and slinging holy water on his kicker.

"My confidence in Greg will not waver," O'Connell said Monday, a day Joseph went 0-for-2 from 50-plus. He has missed five kicks overall this season, going 8-for-12 on field goals and 11-for-12 on PATs.

Victories have a way of curing or at least covering up everything that losses and 29-29 ties against the Packers don't.

Just ask Carlson, who you might remember missed not one, not two, but three kicks wide right in that 2018 tie at Lambeau. His second miss, in overtime, was actually further wide of wide right from 48 yards. His last attempt was a 35-yarder as overtime and his Vikings career expired.

That was Week 2. Of Carlson's rookie season. Five months after he was the highest-drafted kicker — a fifth-rounder — in Vikings history.

(Full-disclosure: Yours truly and everyone out there being totally honest was on board at the time with the Monday morning whacking of Carlson after that monumental meltdown for a team coming off an NFC title game appearance and the blockbuster signing of Kirk Cousins.)

Carlson, of course, has gone on to become the best kicker in the league this side of Justin Tucker. Danny adds a yearly ring to the layers of kicking scar tissue Vikings fans carry with them.

This year, Carlson is a league-best 15-for-15 on field goals one year after he was a league-best 40-for-43. He is one of only two NFL kickers with at least seven attempts that hasn't missed a field goal this year. With 55 points, he's on pace for 187, which would be an NFL record for kickers.

In the NFC North, the kickers from Green Bay (Mason Crosby) and Chicago (Cairo Santos) are a combined 13-for-13. And yet the Vikings and their fans lead the NFC North and have been spared — so far — the kind of angst that once caused the old-school Zim to sit back in an interview, laugh and say, "Kickers drive me crazy."

If kickers get under O'Connell's skin, he has found a new-school way of hiding it.

When Zim was asked in 2018 why he didn't at least try to get into the end zone in the closing seconds of overtime at Green Bay, he said what most of us — and certainly all of us who have become our parents — would have said:

"You know what? Guys are supposed to do their jobs."

Fast forward to a kinder, gentler coach-kicker relationship.

"I think I can do a better job of maybe playing the field position game at times, or possibly going for it on some of those fourth downs," O'Connell said. "We'd love to give [Joseph] some more chip-shot type of field goals."

A coach sharing the blame with a freaking kicker? A coach saying maybe he should have punted or gone for it on fourth down instead? That's not a club most of us (guilty) would have in our bag even if we were 4-1.

But, you know what? Maybe that's what will make O'Connell the ideal head exorcist to cast out the kicking demons that have haunted this franchise for years and always seem to be lurking around the next critical kick.