The Vikings Defense Might Still Be Horrible

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Another week of the offseason, another team to bet on. Today focusing on the Minnesota Vikings and how I’ll be betting on them this year. Full previews coming soon to YouTube and iTunes as the Deep Dive Podcast is fully pivoting to the NFL. Eight Weeks of Getting Ready for the Season starts Wednesday the 28th.

Deep Dive Podcast Upcoming Schedule:

This week: Catching up on the most important offseason moves + hires

Next week: Deep Dive Schedule Matrix

July 10th: Back to twice-a-week podcasts, NFL Team previews begin

Until then….

Let’s get the less important part right off the bat: I think the Vikings offense will be just as good, if not better than last year despite the loss of Dalvin Cook and Adam Thielen.

• QB: Cousins has actually been very much above average and fairly consistent, don’t see that changing in a contract year

• OL: Starting to become a bit of a strength. Good tackles, quick center

• RB: Mattison and crew should be fine as the current outside zone scheme works with basically anyone, don’t really expect a drop-off

• WR/TE: K.J. Osborn, Jordan Addison, and T.J. Hockinson + the reigning OPOY

The market definitely agrees on at least some of this. Jefferson is the betting favorite to be the leader in receiving yards and to repeat as the Offensive Player of the Year while Addison is the top choice to lead all rookies in receiving yardage.

The issue last year (one the Vikings somehow, some way overcame week after week) wasn’t the offense, it was a defense that gave up 25 points per game with an ugly, bend but don’t break game plan that got bent to shit every single week. The decision to move on from Ed Donatell and hire Brian Flores was not only obvious but very much lauded by the media as a whole.

Flores the Savior

There are currently about 900 articles floating around various Vikings publications letting us know how Brian Flores is going to completely turn the defense around and they all lean heavily on one word: “aggressive”.

The Vikings are going to be aggressive, the defensive game plan will be aggressive, the blitzing will be aggressive and everyone involved will be extremely and without a doubt, aggressive.

It sounds really nice on paper and it sounds like Flores and head coach Kevin O'Connell are on the same page moving forward. I’m just not so sure the implementation will go as smoothly as the optimists think considering the current roster.

Most of the arguments are based heavily on past results with the Patriots and Dolphins and don’t seem to be worried about the distinct lack of “being the 2018 Patriots” the Vikings will have this year. From a February article on ESPN.com:

I’d be excited, this all sounds great, but I’m very much pumping the brakes a bit here. You don’t just get to take a coach’s previous success and apply it to a new team based on blitz rates.

In New England, having both the McCourtys, Patrick Chung, and Stephon Bleeping Gilmore as your starting defensive backfield makes it a lot easier to be aggressive with the blitz.

And of course, there’s a reason Kevin Seiffert quotes stats from the final two seasons of Flores’ tenure in Miami: they sucked ass in year one. In 2019, his first year coaching the Dolphins, they gave up 6 yards per play, only forced 16 turnovers, and finished dead last in sacks and pressures.

Fast forward to 2021 and Miami is, as we know, near the top of the league in most of those categories, Xavier Howard is a star and the Dolphins are thinking about taking the next big step forward via the offense. The Vikings taking this sort of step in year two checks out perhaps, but obviously so does a repeat of the growing pains of year one with Flores.

Real Expectations

It’s all very Chicken/Egg with these things, as one could argue that perhaps Flores can take the young and inexperienced players Minnesota has and mold them into a solid defense. Again, maybe? But that still feels more like a “year two” thing with such a big adjustment in the overall scheme and execution.

Pass rush and pass coverage are two parts of a scale, and when you send extra rushers, it puts more responsibility on the coverage unit which usually means more man, less zone. The Vikes used zone around 80% last year. Some of it was the way Donatell ran things, but it was also a collection of having young, old, and inconsistent defensive backs. Either way, it’ll be a major adjustment to get there.

The good news: a lot of the guys who took snaps at CB on last year’s disaster are gone. The bad news: I’m not so sure the new crop is that much better. Current starters should be 3rd round rookie, Mekhi Blackmon, 2nd-year Akayleb Evans, and newly-signed Byron Murphy at the nickel.

So, the HOPE is year two or three of his Dophins stint, the DREAM is his final two years in New England, but the REALITY is that there will be a lot of snaps taken by rookies and 2nd-year guys and we may not see the true fruits of Flores’ labor until 2024 or beyond.

A quick glance at the schedule has a bunch of mobile QBs, a fair amount of high-end WR1s to try and handle, and some very gettable defenses. If it all shakes out like I think, they are probably a bit of an over team until the market adjusts for a high-octane offense and a messy rebuild of a D.

How I’m betting it

Not sure how I ran into such a tough one right off the bat, but boy howdy this wasn’t easy. I really wanted to find a “team to give up the most points” market but apparently, that doesn’t exist at the moment. I did find “least points conceded” and if that’s any indication, I’m guessing they’d be one of the favorites to give up the most.

I still like the Vikings to make the playoffs in a weak NFC but can’t see them having much more success than last year if the coverage unit and pass rush are about the same. No big long shot priced I fell in love with for the purple, but I did see a prop that caught my eye.

So, the official play will be “To Lose in the Wild Card Round” +330 (DraftKings)

Another one I like is the over on the full-season team total. They’ve averaged 426 points/season over the past three years, and one of those was a 16-game season. Another chicken/egg relationship that I think manifests will be the defense continuing to put pressure on the offense to score and the defense being unable to hold opposing offenses down with a lead.

Still see a lot of talking heads call for him to land elsewhere (like the Jets), but people I trust are still saying this Cook/Miami marriage was basically a lock a month ago.

I don’t buy the Panthers at all, feels like they just poke around into every free agent, but the Browns would be very interesting for a team that could be pushing chips to the center of the table again.

Always happy to post good news instead of Antonio Brown’s latest antics, so nice to see Foster Moreau back on the field again.

Not sure if this is breaking. This sort of checks out with where I think we thought he’d be after the injury.

I was 90% sure this was a troll and ended up looking it up. Jackson: 2782, Harbaugh: 2787. It took Jim 139 more games to do it but, he did it.

Want to help out? It’s a free newsletter, so your money’s no good here, but you can do a couple of things if you’re feeling up to it. I’ll be watching Grimace Shake TikToks and writing about how I’ll be betting on the Lions.

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