Since the Minnesota Vikings began a dismal post-bye stretch in which they’ve lost five out of six games, there’s been a trendy phrase floating around the locker room.
‘Everything is still in front of us.’
Team leaders have drawn from that well countless times over the past month and a half – hoping to keep the fresh perspective that the season need not be doomed over an extended bout of losing — but as the window of opportunity for a once-promising campaign diminishes, so does the impact of the future-focused cliché.
the Vikings are very close to seeing their high aspirations dissipate
The Vikings held the NFC North division lead (or a share of it) for 11 consecutive weeks to begin the season. With their most recent loss to Detroit, they find themselves looking up at not only the division leader but a collection of Wild Card hopefuls. The Lions have a stranglehold on the North with a one game lead plus the head-to-head tiebreaker, effectively making their lead two games. In the Wild Card chase, the Vikings – on the outside looking in — are tied with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and would lose the tiebreaker at the moment due to conference record. If Philadelphia defeats Green Bay Monday night, the Vikings will fall behind the Eagles via head-to-head tiebreaker. And each 6-5 team is chasing the Washington Redskins, who, at 6-4-1, are virtually immune to tiebreakers thanks to, well, a tie.
But with tiebreaker situations shaping up as they are, the Vikings are very close to seeing their high aspirations dissipate unless they’re able to win, at minimum, four of the final five games.
For players and coaches alike, it’s becoming harder and harder to hide their frustrations. Left guard Alex Boone sat forlornly at his locker room Sunday morning, answering questions with his back turned to reporters. Injuries have depleted the offensive line to the point where Boone can’t count the number of fallen teammates. “What is this? Like Player 12 coming in now?” wondered Boone. “It’s just one of those things where you’ve got to regroup.”
The Vikings are integrating center Nick Easton this week as Joe Berger recovers from a concussion that knocked him out of last Thursday’s game and kept him out of practice Sunday and Monday. Berger was one of a dozen players that were either limited or did not participate during the team’s second practice of the week. The offensive line has lost three players to season-ending injuries since Week 2. The secondary currently has five players dinged up, including game-changing safety Harrison Smith. Winter Park has turned into a hospital wing with limps, boots, casts and crutches around every corner.
the team has again succumbed to the perpetual attrition that makes the NFL so unforgiving
The fatigue of answering injury questions weighs on head coach Mike Zimmer. The Vikings dealt with a rash of pectoral injuries earlier in Zimmer’s tenure, prompting the Vikings to change strength and conditioning coaches from Evan Marcus to Brent Salazar. But the team has again succumbed to the perpetual attrition that makes the NFL so unforgiving. “We’re going to look at when guys got hurt, where they got hurt, how they got hurt, but at this point, it’s just football things,” said Zimmer. “We’ve obviously tried to put our finger on a lot of that, but we’re not getting guys hurt in the weight room. Most every one of them have been on the field or during the games or something like that.”
This is the longest-sustained swoon in Zimmer’s tenure, and it has forced veterans to channel motivation from years past. Chad Greenway pointed to 2012, when the Vikings won their final four games to sneak into the playoffs after falling to 6-6 through 12 games. “In the NFL, it’s about survival, it’s a marathon,” said Greenway. “That’s why you can’t get too up or too down, that’s why it’s a one-week season. I think we’ve done a good job of doing that, even though we’ve taken some really tough losses. We haven’t played well in critical situations, which makes it really tough to handle, makes it really emotionally tough on you after a loss, just knowing that you didn’t quite execute well enough in those situations. By no means do we want that to be our season. We have five games left that could rewrite that.”
If the Vikings lose to the league-leading Cowboys, they’ll fall to 6-6, just as they were in 2012. That leaves Minnesota with no choice but to run the table, which may still not be enough. Not after dropping four games against direct competitors in the NFC playoff race. The Vikings have washed away any wiggle room they had in mid-October, and now their playoff dreams teeter in the balance.
“I think everyone’s a little bit frustrated right now,” said quarterback Sam Bradford. “For whatever reason, we just weren’t able to come back off the bye and play the way we have those first five games, and I think anytime you go through a stretch like we’ve had, people do get frustrated, and it’s tough.”
