ALAMEDA — Mike Zimmer couldn’t have been more blunt.

Less than 24 hours prior, Vikings rookie kicker Daniel Carlson had missed all three field-goal attempts in a Week 2 tie with the Packers, including two in overtime. His third, a 35-yarder as the clock hit triple zeroes in overtime, drifted wide right. Carlson gripped his knees and stared straight down as the Lambeau Field crowd buried him in cheers.

His final miss was his final kick with the Vikings, who made him the first kicker drafted when they used a fifth-round pick on him in April. Zimmer, the Vikings head coach, was asked the next day why he waived the SEC all-time leading scorer just two games into his NFL career.

“Did you see the game?” Zimmer said.

“Was it an easy decision?” one reporter asked.

“Yep,” Zimmer said. “It was pretty easy.”

After his two-day public humiliation of sorts, Carlson and his wife hopped in the car. They drove three hours south to Ankeny, Iowa, the home of renowned special teams guru Jamie Kohl. Carlson spent four days with Kohl making technical adjustments, namely to the length of his strides preceding kicks. Kohl actually wanted Carlson unemployed for at least a month so he could fine-tune his new mechanics instead of test them in high-pressure situations right away.

Carlson stayed without a job for five weeks, then signed with the Raiders ahead of their Week 8 game against the Colts. Since then, he has hit 13-of-14 field goals, including 12 straight since hitting the upright in Week 9. He’s on pace to break the franchise record for single-season field-goal percentage, set by Sebastian Janikowski in 2012 (91.2%). All 15 of his extra points with the Raiders have sailed through, too, and Raiders coach Jon Gruden has said twice in the last three weeks he hopes Carlson is the team’s long-term solution at kicker.

Not too bad for a 23-year-old who, not three months ago, drove across the Minnesota-Iowa border unemployed, unsure when his next opportunity would come.

“It’s definitely been a whirlwind and roller coaster up and down a little bit, but I’m a firm believer that my life and what I’ve gone through and what I’ve been placed in, God has a plan for it,” Carlson told the Bay Area News Group this week. “That’s my faith background speaking. I think the situation I’m in right now is an amazing situation. I have a coaching staff, teammates that believe in me, and so it’s nice to be in a situation where I feel there’s a lot of things ahead for us in the future. And I would love to be a part of that.”

Carlson’s future seems promising now, and it did too entering the 2018 draft. In four years at Auburn he hit 92-of-114 field goals (80.7%) and all 198 extra points. His 474 points are the most in SEC history. Only two kickers were drafted in 2018, Carlson in the fifth round by the Vikings and New Mexico’s Jason Sanders by the Dolphins in the seventh.

While Carlson beat veteran Kai Forbath for Minnesota’s starting job in training camp, the Raiders waived incumbent lefty Giorgio Tavecchio in favor of veteran right-footer Mike Nugent. Undrafted rookie Eddy Piñeiro seemed to be on the fast track to start, but a groin injury suffered at the end of training camp eventually sent him to season-ending injured reserve. Now Nugent was up, the Raiders on their third kicker atop the depth chart since Sebastian Janikowski’s 17-year run as starter ended before the 2017 season.

The same Sept. 16 afternoon that Nugent went 2-for-2 in Denver and improved to 4-for-4 on the season, Carlson missed from 48, 49 and 35 yards to drop his field-goal percentage to 25% over Weeks 1 and 2. The inevitable followed, the draft’s best kicker the first to lose his job this season. Carlson first talked to family, then agent Mike McCartney. The next call went to Kohl, and off to Ankeny, Iowa Carlson and his wife drove.

“I didn’t want to dwell on it, really,” Carlson said. “It’s like, ‘OK, what can we do to make the best of this to change things and work on the things I’ve wanted to work on?’ Now I have a chance.”

Carlson says things he wanted to work on because he didn’t have time in between the end of his senior season and the beginning of the NFL season to shorten his strides before kicks, with the combine, pro day, private workouts and training camp affording little time to overhaul mechanics. Now he had no job, and time to alter the distance at which he took his three steps back and two to the side.

Kohl said he noticed this flaw back in February, that Carlson’s elongated strides only helped make kicks in practice but not in games, when compact run-ups help combat charging NFL defensive linemen. Kohl, who has known Carlson for almost a decade, brought in long-snappers and holders to help. Carlson and his wife stayed with Kohl’s family for the final three days of a four-day workout. Normally Carlson wouldn’t kick on back-to-back days, but he wanted to for muscle memory. Over those four days he shortened his strides so that he stood 20 inches closer to the ball when he reached set position.

“You have to move a little quicker to get that operation time working,” Carlson said. “It was almost like I was coming to the ball too fast, too aggressive and a little out of control. By shortening it, by staying more compact and then a little more control, it just makes it a lot easier for me to make sure everything’s consistent right when I get to the ball and when I’m making contact on the ball.”

Even with Carlson’s newfound mechanics, Kohl still wanted him jobless.

“I was hopeful that he would not get signed for about four or five weeks because he needed some time to go home and practice and to kind of gain confidence in some of the new things that we were trying,” Kohl said. “One kick here, one kick there literally has made or broken some guys’ careers. I did feel that Daniel would get another shot. I’m just happy he had some time kind of to re-gather himself and to feel confident in the new things we were working on.”

The Raiders contacted Carlson’s camp after Nugent suffered an eventual season-ending hip injury Week 3 in Miami. Carlson couldn’t work out for Oakland because of a previously scheduled workout. Besides, he and Kohl thought the Raiders might not provide long-term stability since they didn’t know how serious Nugent’s injury actually was.

The Raiders instead signed undrafted rookie Matt McCrane, who went 4-for-9 on field goals over four games. During that span, Carlson worked out for three or four teams, he said. Some, he added, were just trial runs with teams who didn’t really need a new kicker. Then on Tuesday, Oct. 23, Carlson worked out for the Raiders, a team he thought could use him right away. He signed later that day as the Raiders waived McCrane.

“In the long run, it was probably for the best that I had a little time to work on some things. If you have a game each Sunday, each week, you really don’t have time to make adjustments and feel comfortable going into it,” Carlson said. ” … That was kind of a blessing in disguise was yeah, we did kind of make a plan. We could try and get some workouts next week, we could try and sign with a team quickly, but I wouldn’t have time to make those adjustments. In the long run, hopefully that would pay off.

“Even when I came for the workout here, I wasn’t, say, 100% comfortable, but it was close where I was hitting the ball well, starting to get used to it and I think since then I’ve gotten more and more comfortable and hopefully in the future I’ll do better and better.”

With the Raiders sitting at 1-8, trailing the Cardinals 21-20 in Week 11 with two seconds left, Carlson trotted out for a — wait for it — 35-yard field goal. The same distance from which his Vikings tenure ended. The same triple zeroes that would flash on the clock by the time his kick hit the ground, whether it sailed through the uprights before doing so or not.

Carlson admitted this week the similarities between that kick and his Week 2 miss briefly entered his mind, especially with time to think during the timeout before the kick. He claims he wasn’t nervous, and it sure didn’t seem like it. He sunk the kick, jumping into the outstretched arms of holder Johnny Townsend as teammates mobbed him. Quite the contrast from Carlson staring at the Lambeau Field grass in shock by himself, hands on knees.

Since those heroics Carlson has made seven consecutive field goals, including two from a career-long 50 yards.

“He’s been a real bright spot for us,” Gruden said last Sunday in Cincinnati after Carlson went 3-for-3 against the Bengals. “Hopefully, as I said a few weeks ago, he’s the long-term solution here for the next several years. You get a kicker, he’s going to have to be your leading scorer every year. You get a guy like this that can kick off and make long-range field goals and critical field goals, it’s exciting.”

A competition awaits between Carlson and Piñeiro this offseason, and the Auburn grad is stating an early case to be the clubhouse favorite.

Two games remain for Carlson to finish an otherwise miserable Raiders season as one of the team’s few reasons for hope, and a fledgling NFL career that couldn’t have started any worse is officially back on track.

“If I’m gonna bet on anybody,” Kohl said, “I’m gonna bet on Daniel Carlson.”