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

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 Redskins 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."