AP

Good news, rookie Daniel Carlson: You’re now the Vikings kicker. Bad news: Daniel Carlson, you’re now the Vikings kicker.

The fifth-round draft pick recently won a training-camp competition with Kai Forbath. And Carlson celebrated by missing a pair of field goals and pissing off his head coach.

“I’m going to chalk this one up to a bad night but hopefully it gets better,” Zimmer initially told reporters after Friday night’s game against the Seahawks, a measured and positive message. Also. one that didn’t last very long.

After Carlson’s first miss (a 42-yarder), the Vikings scored a touchdown. They went for two. A reporter asked Zimmer if the goal was to give the starting offense experience with the two-point play (which is how Carlson interpreted it, based on his own comments to reporters).

“No,” Zimmer said. “Just let [Carlson] know that if he’s going to miss them, I’m going to go for two.”

But what about possibly rattling the rookie’s confidence?

“Well, I was not in a good mood right then, so, I wasn’t worried about his confidence,” Zimmer said. “I mean, he missed like two kicks all preseason and he missed two tonight. It’s never a good thing when you just release a guy and this guy goes in there and misses. So maybe he needs some more pressure on him.”

Carlson doesn’t seem to be feeling the pressure yet.

“[E]very kicker is going to have different misses in different situations,” Carlson said. “Luckily this is preseason, and we did get a win, so those are things I can be excited about, that it wasn’t the end of the world. But I think as a kicker you just got to be prepared for the highs and the lows and try to stay calm and consistent and just continue to do your job one day at a time and one kick at a time. Like I said, there’s nothing I can do right now to take it back, but I can get ready for the next kick that I get a chance to do.”

Other than long snapper, kicker is the ultimate “you had one job” position in the game. So if Carlson keeps missing kicks, eventually that “next kick” will happen with someone else on the roster. Eventually, that “next kick” will happen with Carlson kicking for another team.