The Bucs dropped the ball in picking kicker Roberto Aguayo in the draft’s second round last year, and now the team’s given up on him, George Díaz writes.
The Tampa Bay Bucs should have followed the advice of every fantasyfootball addict on the planet: Never draft a kicker.
The team gave up on Roberto Aguayo on Saturday by placing him on waivers. It’s a sobering admission of a foul-up for a team that wasted a second-round draft pick — and the 59th overall selection — on a kicker a year ago.
Call it a $428,000 mistake because Aguayo is guaranteed that money.
Aguayo was a feel-good story for a lot of reasons, and a kid you wanted to root for, starting with his ties to the Groveland South Lake High and Florida State programs. We like to take care of our own around here, and the Bucs have certainly made bales of hay with players from Florida.
Take a look at Jameis Winston from FSU (first-round, first overall, 2015) and Vernon Hargreaves from Florida (first round, 11th overall, 2016).
But trading up — trading up! — to draft a kicker?!!
Aguayo came to Tampa from Tallahassee a year ago as a much-heralded
prospect. He leaves a little more than a year later as a highly inconsistent one, with most of the issues between the ears.
It happens to golfers, too. They get the yips. They end up in the rough. Kickers end up far right or far left. Clank. Career over, perhaps.
Aguayo made just 22 of 31 field goal attempts last season, the worst percentage among starting kickers in the NFL. He was only four of 10 between 40 and 49 yards and missed his only attempt beyond 50 yards. He also missed two of 34 extra-point tries.
After missing an extra point and a 47-yard field goal attempt during Friday's 23-12 loss at Cincinnati, coach Dirk Koetter and general manager Jason Licht had seen enough, and cut Aguayo on Saturday.
“It’s a production business,” Koetter said Saturday, repeating that phrase several times during a press conference.
Aguayo had kicked fairly well in the first weeks of practice. On Aug. 4, Koetter had marveled that Aguayo was “lights out.” Now he’s just out.
It’s easy to play Sunday Morning Quarterback, but the Bucs should have used their draft collateral on a position player. All they had to do was a little research.
Adam Vinatieri was signed by the New England Patriots as an undrafted free agent in 1996.
Dan Bailey was signed by the Dallas Cowboys as an undrafted free agent in 2011.
Justin Tucker was signed by the Baltimore Ravens as an undrafted free agent in 2012.
Aguayo was the best college kicker in the land in 2013, winning the Groza Award, but the game sometimes doesn’t translate on a bigger stage.
Everybody is in it for a paycheck. And things can get blurry if a player starts to over-think things.
“When you get bored doing something, ‘Well, there’s more I can do,’ ” FSU coach Jimbo Fisher said last year, alluding to Aguayo’s struggles as a pro. “‘I want to change this. I want to change that.’ Kickers like tweaking those golf swings. And they get going in a direction, sometimes they can’t even find out where they were originally.
“Like I remember I told him as a sophomore, in the spring he wasn’t kicking really good. ‘Well, this guy said I could get 5 more
yards.’ I said, ‘Did any of those guys make 23 of 24 or 25 of 26 or whatever the heck you did and win the Groza?’ I said, ‘Why are you listening to them? Why don’t they listen to you?’ ’’
Maybe the voices inside his head got to Aguayo. Whatever the source, the Bucs only needed their eyes to re-think the situation. Veteran Nick Folk is your new Bucs kicker and at the modest price of $750,000 in guaranteed money.
Oh, well, at least the folks at “Hard Knocks’’ got a compelling narrative for the second episode of the season.
Hopefully they didn’t bring in a fantasy-football expert in a cameo role to chastise Licht and Koetter.