What we can learn from Dan Bailey’s implosion
Joe Johnson
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If I had the time/software/wherewithal to go through all of my articles/weekly radio appearances over the last month, I could put together a montage of me saying “… if the Minnesota Vikings can clean up their copious mistakes then…” / “… one of the games all of these mistakes will end up affecting the final outcome…” that’d be as long as it was proof that I have a very limited repertoire of football knowledge / takes.
Welp. Turns out that today was “…proof that the Vikings can’t” / “… today was that day…”
Sigh.
Case in point is the following article from the homepage of Yahoo! a site that is somehow still a thing despite reminding everyone my age of middle school and their super cool @yahoo.com email address (that I’d bet dollars to donuts includes a 69 somewhere in the name).
Ugh.
Why.
Why is this happening.
I mean. Dan Bailey was the second most accurate kicker in NFL history before signing with the Vikings. The more important word(s) in that sentence? “Was” (or “before”), both (work). He entered Sunday’s implosion as just the sixth most accurate, which is nothing to be embarrassed about but also means that his career in Minnesota has been a mixture of being pretty good and terrible.
I’ve never written about this, but we had a writer that worked for us back in 2018 and he did a deep dive article on Bailey. He talked about Bailey’s career and personal life, and mentioned that Bailey had (and was still) married (to) his high school sweetheart. Later on, whilst essentially bashing the start of Bailey’s Vikings tenure, he mentioned that his contract could pay for lots of fur jackets for his HS sweetheart.
The next day I received an email from someone with a Bailey last name. Turns out it was his Mom (I’m not joking). The initial email was essentially “If you’re going to bash someone get your facts right”, as Bailey had divorced his HS sweetheart years earlier.
Turns out that all those celebrity bio websites that look like they’re going to ask you to donate money to a Nigerian Prince so he can get his gold bars out of customs were wrong, but I apologized profusely and fixed the article.
I was ironically writing an article at the time defending Bailey and pointing to then special teams coordinator Mike Preifer as the issue in a “canary in the coal mine” situation. Bailey’s mother then replied to that article saying that kicker’s are just one part of the actual kicking process, with the long-snapper and holder being obviously super important.
She then said something that, to me, explained what Bailey thought was the actual issue. That when you change holders constantly, it screws up the process (as the kicker only has X second(s) to do what he’s doing).
That makes me wonder whether or not the change to the Vikings’ long-snapper recently has something to do with Bailey’s completely disastrous last couple of weeks.
The Vikings cut long-snapper Austin Cutting after the Carolina Panthers game, which means that the arrival of the new long-snapper coincides with Bailey’s regression.
It could be more of a correlation thing than causation thing. But if Bailey’s Mom was reaching out to us back when the team was making changes to the kicking trio, and Bailey was struggling … and the Vikings made recent changes to the trio and Bailey is struggling…
… I guess I’d better check my email.