Dalvin Cook fires up his tablet and goes to work watching film: Upcoming opponents, past performances, practice reps — the whole routine. But that’s also where Cook has stored some of his most valuable video, a Barry Sanders highlight reel.
“Barry just stands there, they hand it to him, and he just shakes the whole team and runs to go score, and that was pretty much every play he did that,” marveled Cook, clearly happy to share his respect for the former Detroit Lions running back. “I watch it, not because it’s Barry Sanders; I watch it because how he sets his runs up, how he develops things in his mind and I kind of see it from a clear-eye view. Every time I watch his plays, I see something different from him and how he sees things. I just want to be as explosive as he was.
“I know that’s not possible, but I’m going to try to match it as best that I can.”
It’s amazing to think that as the rest of the NFL looks up at Cook on the rushing leaderboard, he isn’t looking down upon his peers. Instead, he’s finding ways to look up to loftier goals… like imitating Sanders, one of the league’s most unanimously revered.
Once again, Cook finds himself mentioned in the NFL’s running back pantheon. It feels like Vikings fans have had these conversations about him before, usually at about this point in the football season.
He has always been a fast starter. Isolate the first four weeks of Cook’s first four seasons, and only Ezekiel Elliott has more rushing yards over that 16-game sample. As a rookie, he rattled off over 400 all-purpose yards in three-and-a-half games before tearing his ACL. In 2019 he was averaging 5.3 yards per carry until an injury beset him at the halfway mark of the season. His start to the 2020 campaign shouldn’t be surprising… yet his last two games have nonetheless produced several jaw-dropping moments.
“If I see him running down the field I get really happy,” said Vikings right tackle Brian O’Neill, “because you don’t really know what happens behind you. So you see that and you’re like, ‘Yes.'”
After a stagnant start for the Vikings offense that largely eliminated Cook in second halves because of big deficits, the freshly-extended running back went on a tear in Weeks 3-4. His 311 yards in the past two games has him leading the NFL in rushing with 424 yards. He leads the NFL with 269 yards after contact, and his 21 broken tackles — 10 of them coming in his Week 4 romp over the Houston Texans defense — lead the league as well. His four runs of 15 yards or more are tied for third, and he’s on pace for 24 touchdowns.
But his annual fast starts have yet to extrapolate to full-season results because of his injury history. Despite wearing teams down over the course of a game, it’s Cook who has typically been the one worn down by season’s end. But the consistency with which he’s delivered early in seasons goes to show that few backs are better than Cook when healthy. That’s why the Vikings took the plunge and committed almost $30 million guaranteed to the former third-round pick.
“Guys probably face backs bigger than me,” Cook said. “Like I say, I’m not the biggest back, but in my heart I feel like I am. And at the end of the day, it’s going to be man versus man on the field. It’s just like my preparation versus yours, and that’s why I put myself in as much game reps as I can during the week.”
Cook bulked up in the offseason to make his body stronger, but he doesn’t seem to have lost an ounce of speed — just ask defenders trying to catch him before he reaches the edge. He has logged two of NFL Next Gen Stats’ top 15 “Remarkable Rushes” this year, an analytic that measures yards above expected at the moment of a handoff. He’s making his offensive line look good, picking up the group that literally picks up Cook most times after he reaches the end zone. After some of his finest runs, they’ve gotten in a habit of sneaking second looks at the replay board.
“Sometimes they’ll play the replay on the scoreboard, and you’ll kind of look at it and you’ll just be like, ‘Did he really just do that again?'” said O’Neill. “Just because there’s some things that are special up there, and I know he’ll continue to do his best to try to do those. But there’s definitely those moments where you catch it and you’re just like…”
O’Neill used that moment to mimic a dumbfounded expression that he no doubt displayed after Cook’s second touchdown run against the Texans in Week 4.
“He broke like six tackles on like a five-yard run,” O’Neill said. “You don’t see that from a lot of people. He’s a special talent. We really appreciate it, and we try to tell him a lot, and he tells us that, too.”
At the quarter mark of the season, Cook is in a familiar position. While it shouldn’t be taken for granted that he finds himself battling for best-in-the-league status, the real test will be how long he sustain his production.
