Reports of Roberto Aguayo demise are premature

When Roberto Aguayo hit the field in front of the media for the first time this year, he missed four of his five kicks on narrow goalposts, while Nick Folk hit all of his. That was immediately taken up as a sign on the wall for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their kickers.

That sign was a bit premature, though, if we can believe what general manager Jason Licht told Jonathan Jones of Sports Illustrated. Licht emphasized that the media had only seen a small portion of the competition, and they’d be making decisions based on much bigger samples than those few kicks.

“The media doesn’t see the other 10 or 20 kicks that they do per day on the other field. They’re being charted, too. I’m not going to tell you what they are. But if people actually knew how Roberto was doing over there, they wouldn’t have taken the Day One report from the skinny posts like they did and made such a big deal of it. But they can only report what they see and I understand that.”

As we said at the time: judging players on a handful of kicks is not a great idea. Any talk of Roberto Aguayo’s definite demise is premature, and we’ll have to wait until preseason to get a better view of where they stand—and even then we’ll only get a limited perspective.