But the Vikings' Ryan Longwell is enjoying one of his best seasons. There's more than one reason, but who could have expected Tiger Woods to play a role?

Longwell lives in the same community as Woods near Orlando, Fla. They sometimes work out in the same gym, and Longwell was inspired by Woods.

"He's already the best in the world, but he's trying to get better, so I kind of looked at that," Longwell said. "On top of that, because we are around each other, I get to see how hard he works."

Working out next to Woods tends to rub off, in a good way.

"People don't realize that he goes out and runs three or four miles on a Tuesday of a tournament week, before his knee injury. I watched him, and I realize I can get better at what I do. Just because I've done it for 10 years doesn't mean you don't want to change because it's worked. I took that approach, and it can either work or it doesn't, and luckily it has."

Longwell made 29 of 34 field-goal attempts during the regular season. His final kick was a 50-yarder as time expired to beat the New York Giants 20-19 on Sunday, securing the NFC North championship. On Tuesday, Longwell was named the NFC special-teams player of the week.

What's perhaps most impressive is that Longwell is 6 for 6 from 50 yards or longer, a team record. He remains accurate and with plenty of range after the grind of a long season.

Special-teams coach Paul Ferraro gave Longwell plenty of rest during the preseason in practices and games. The Vikings relied on Steven Hauschka to handle kickoff duties through much of the exhibition season before he was released and signed with Baltimore.

Longwell also credits long-snapper Cullen Loeffler and punter Chris Kluwe, who holds on field goals. Now in their third season working together, they're part of the reason Longwell's 85.3 accuracy rate is his highest since 2004. He didn't miss any extra-point attempts this season for the first time since '04.

"To do what we did beyond 50 this year is awesome," Longwell said. "It's a credit to coach Ferraro for keeping me fresh in training camp. It's a credit to Cullen and Kluwe, because from that range you have no wiggle room on the snap and the hold. They're as good as there is in this league."

The strategy of giving Longwell more rest during the exhibition season is paying off, coach Brad Childress said.

"I think he's live-legged," Childress said. "He banged that ball pretty good (on Sunday). I would hope (rest) takes a little wear and tear off."

So how much credit does Tiger get? Well, Longwell and the world's most famous golfer aren't workout partners. If anything, they talk more about golf than Football.

But Longwell said watching Woods helped him go with a different approach to his offseason conditioning. Starting last year, Longwell began diversifying his workouts to build endurance, not solely relying on weightlifting.

"He'd be running and doing more of a body-weight type of set," Longwell said of Woods, "so I went to more push-ups, pull-ups, plyometrics, more jump training, added in more yoga and kickboxing type of stuff."

Longwell's kickoff average of 64.5 yards this season was his best since his rookie season in Green Bay in 1997.

Conditioning is one thing, but hitting pressure kicks is another. His game-winner against the Giants was the 15th of his career, his third this season.

He made a 30-yarder at New Orleans with 13 seconds left on "Monday Night Football" for a 30-27 victory on Oct. 6. The next week, he lifted the Vikings to a 12-10 victory over Detroit with a 38-yard kick with nine seconds on the clock.

The kick that beat the Giants capped a strange final 30 seconds in which three timeouts were called: one by the Vikings with nine seconds remaining to stop the clock and two by the Giants to try to unnerve Longwell. The Vikings even ran a play between timeouts to try to take more time off the clock so the Giants wouldn't get the ball back.

"It was one of the more bizarre situations I've been in," Longwell said.

Longwell said he had no idea that the Chicago Bears were about to lose at Houston, thereby clinching the division title for Minnesota regardless of the outcome of Longwell's kick.

"No one came up and talked to me, but that would have been good information to have," Longwell said.

Even in his 12th season, Longwell still gets a little nervous. But he said he works with that pressure instead of fighting it.

"It's impossible to block out," he said. "But I think like Tiger Woods has said, once you've won a major, you can rely on that again in the next major. Once you've kicked a game-winner, you're nervous, but you can kind of rely on the fact that I've done this before (and) I can do it again."