If Mike Zimmer didn’t have high aspirations for the 2020 Vikings, maybe he would’ve permitted more postgame celebration. For a second straight week, his team battled back from a two-possession deficit and won a game at the proverbial buzzer.
But while it takes guts to come back and win NFL games, Zimmer isn’t blind to the quality of opponents, nor the circumstances that are backing his squad into corners they’ve been fortunate to emerge from. There is a quarter of the season left, and Zimmer wants this season to be remembered for more than just a feel-good run to secure a .500 record. The head coach understands that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New Orleans Saints — two of their next three opponents — will not self destruct like Minnesota’s last two foes. If the Vikings want to make the playoffs, they’ll likely need to beat either the Buccaneers or the Saints, which will require substantially more than Minnesota showed in Sunday’s 27-24 overtime win against the 1-10 Jaguars.
“I have mixed feelings, to be honest with you,” he said in response to the first question of Sunday’s press conference. “It’s good to get a win. It was important for us to get a win today. We didn’t play particularly well at times. Defensively, they went right down and scored on us. I thought we played a lot better throughout the course of the game, except we got some turnovers, which were big. We had a chance to win the game on the two-point play and we don’t get that done.”
Zimmer continued for over 200 words, rattling off the myriad mistakes his team made in victory. At the game’s critical junctures, Minnesota let Jacksonville roll down the field for a game-tying touchdown drive, missed a go-ahead field goal and squandered its first overtime opportunity.
And that was just in the game’s final few minutes.
Good teams are allowed to lean on the occasional ‘a win’s a win’ rhetoric after an ugly one. Hey, even the 2017 Vikings won some clunkers. But even after a 5-1 stretch, a Player of the Month award for Dalvin Cook and a Player of the Week award for Kirk Cousins, it feels like there is still a much higher level to be reached. Hence a subdued locker room after an emotionally-exhausting win.
“Offensively, it was a struggle today for the most part,” Zimmer continued. “They were loading up the box on us and really making sure to take care of Dalvin. Obviously, the interception for the touchdown the first play of the second half. We fumble the ball on the one-yard line going in. We missed three kicks. … I’m talking to the team about, it’s important that we’re winning these games, but we’ve got to do these things way better than what we’re doing. They all understand. There wasn’t a lot of hooting and hollering in the locker room the last two weeks. They know we have to do better to continue to win games.”
The Vikings have committed nine turnovers in the last four games, yet were somehow a fourth-down stop against the Dallas Cowboys away from winning all four. The cliche goes that the mark of a good team is when it can play bad football and still get a win, but what if the bad football rears its head every week? Justin Jefferson and Cook have already recorded 1,000-yard seasons, and Adam Thielen is closing in. Cousins has played better since the bye, and the offensive line has taken strides with the improvements of Garrett Bradbury and Ezra Cleveland.
But something remains out of whack. While the highlight reels showcase Minnesota’s elite skill players putting together remarkable seasons, the fumbles, penalties and odd decision-making in between are holding them back. Sunday, for example, Cousins threw a pick-six to start the second half, Cook fumbled at the goal line, and Dakota Dozier false-started when the Vikings were an inch from victory in overtime.
“We can’t do those things and continue to win football games,” Zimmer said. “It’s a credit to their heart right now that they’re winning games by making these kind of mistakes, to be honest with you.
“We have to stop doing these things. It’s going to cost us games down the road. If we stop doing those things and we continue to play with the heart and fight and things we have, we have a chance to play. But the last two weeks you come in the locker room and it’s more relieved than excited. That’s probably a good thing because I think they know where they’re at in this world right now.”
Minnesota arguably looked better in losses to the Tennessee Titans and Seattle Seahawks (combined record 16-8) than it did in recent wins against also-rans in the Chicago Bears, Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars (combined record 10-27). Sans a big win in Week 9 over the listless Detroit Lions, the Vikings have yet to truly put away an opponent in 2020.
For a team with no margin for error, the Vikings have survived many of them. Remarkably, though, with the Arizona Cardinals 38-28 loss to the Los Angeles Rams, the Vikings are in playoff position entering Week 14.
In the big picture, that’s a remarkable feat. Minnesota went 1-5 before the bye and pundits speculated they’d sell off stars at the trade deadline. They’re now 5-1 since the deadline and have jumped from the “In the Hunt” graphic to the full-on 7-seed. The close games that were lost early have become wins recently. But the fact that the Vikings aren’t satisfied shows how much further they have to go to climb out of the biggest mess in Zimmer’s tenure. Cousins said during the bye week that the final 10 games would tell the story of the Vikings’ season. That 10-game stretch has now been shrunk to four. Do the Vikings have what it takes to beat a contender or two in December?
“We’ll enjoy the win tonight,” Cousins said, “but you also have to go back and look critically at every play, just like you always do, and think about how you can be better and how you can improve. Now we enter the final four games of the regular season, the fourth quarter if you will, and we’ve got to be at our best in the fourth quarter. We have some good teams we’re going to have to play, and we’re going to need our best football to have a shot to get into the playoffs.
“Those final four games are going to tell the story. I remember 2018, I felt like the last game of the year kind of told the story. So you can play all the way through, but you have to keep doing it week after week. Otherwise, it’s not going to matter where you were on December 6.”
Week 14 can go one of the two ways. The Vikings face Tom Brady and the Buccaneers, who have looked disjointed offensively in two straight losses. A win and they’ll move into the 6-seed. A loss and they’ll likely be humbled heading into a lose-and-you’re-out situation against the Bears.
At some point, the Vikings’ will need to turn another corner, and what better way to do it than against a six-time Super Bowl champion quarterback?
