Patrick Peterson has done a lot in his 10-year career but says he always wanted to leave a game early. Not in the Randy Moss sense, where the SuperFreak tried to dip out of a disappointing 21-18 loss to Washington in 2004. Instead, he wanted to do it as a celebration. A way to signify that his team had done the job. They defeated their opponent and are going home.
That’s why he grabbed Cameron Dantzler as he neared the tunnel behind the end zone after Dantzler stripped old friend Ihmir Smith-Marsette and recovered the fumble. Peterson is mentoring Dantzler, 24, leading his fellow Louisianian every step of the way. In this case, it was through a tunnel that had given the Minnesota Vikings trouble in the second half of their 29-22 win over the Chicago Bears on Sunday.
“I’ve always wanted to do that, man,” Peterson admitted after the game. “Especially as a defense when you make a play. There’s nothing the other team can do. The game’s over. Let’s go ahead and take a shower early.”
The Vikings didn’t just emerge out of the tunnel to start the game; they shot out of it. Minnesota won the coin toss and elected to receive the ball. They methodically moved down the field, only facing third down once on their 12-play, 86-yard opening drive. Kirk Cousins completed his first 17 passes, a Vikings record. Justin Jefferson had eight catches for 122 yards just after the end of the first quarter, and he would end up breaking another one of Moss’ records. They led the Bears 21-3 with 2:11 to go in the first half. The Kevin O’Connell offense had finally arrived.
But they exited the tunnel to start the second half looking like Mike Zimmer’s Vikings. The Chicago Bears had scored on a 46-second drive before the half to cut the lead to 21-10, and they scored a touchdown on their first drive after receiving the ball to make it 21-16. Then they capitalized on Greg Joseph‘s second missed field goal to make it 21-19, and Cairo Santos converted another field goal following Cousins’ interception to take a 22-21 lead.
The Bears were slowly, methodically dragging the Vikings into the morass. Zimmer’s Vikings frequently succumbed to Chicago’s quicksand, losing to inferior teams that slowly, painfully sucked the life out of them. Cousins started the game with a quieted mind, as O’Connell calls it, taking what the defense gave him and moving the ball down the field. But in the second half, Kindle Vildor picked Cousins when the Vikings’ QB tried to force a bootleg pass to Adam Thielen instead of checking down to C.J. Ham.
Cousins said he let previous misses down the field cloud his judgment and tried to make up for them with that throw.
“That was an example of allowing previous plays to influence your decision instead of just running the play in a vacuum,” Cousins said. “I had taken that flat route so many times and a couple of times last week, a time earlier in this game with Irv (Smith Jr.), a guy was open elsewhere, and I kind of was allowing those previous plays to start to (influence his throw).”
It was a common tension in the Zimmer era. Cousins would play conservatively, and Zimmer would demand that he push the ball down the field. Then he’d take a risk, throw a pick, and Zimmer would get upset that he put his defense in a precarious position. Cousins’ pick had let Chicago back in the game. The Bears had taken the lead. The ghost of Zimmer continued to hover over this team.
This year’s team is different, though, right? They’re winning the close games, grinding out ugly wins. Would it be nice if they led for more than 45 seconds against the Detroit Lions? Of course. Should they have pummeled the injury-hampered New Orleans Saints in London? For sure. But they’re resilient, they’ll tell you. A win’s a win. It’s early, and everybody is learning a new system. Maybe the difference is that the Vikings are marginally better and will play better because of the new regime’s culture. Perhaps that will make all the difference.
“Coach put up a stat that (15 out of 16) games last week were one-possession games in the fourth quarter, so there you go, right?” said Adam Thielen. “It’s gonna come down to the fourth quarter, and the teams that are able to finish consistently are gonna have a great record, are gonna have an opportunity to the playoffs.”
Thielen added that O’Connell has started practices with two-minute drives, and they’ve spent time doing end-of-half, end-of-game situations. Those are important, as anyone who watched the Vikings last year will attest. Thielen and multiple other players insist that these close wins are building calluses. They’re learning how to win close games. A key difference.
“The stats don’t lie,” he says. “The games come down to the last plays of the games, the last quarter of games.
“We’re gonna need that moving forward. Would we like to blow teams out? Yes! So we’ve got to find a way to, when we get in those positions, 21-3, that we just keep putting our foot on the gas pedal. But there will be some good learning.”
Defensive end Harrison Phillips echoed the same sentiment. “It’s just a testament to the grit of this team, the way this team was built, the type of people they brought in,” he offered. “It would be nice to blow somebody out here. Maybe that’s coming when we’re firing on all cylinders, but again, it’s just a true test of the people that we have to win this thing.”
That’s not wrong. But it feels like if the Vikings keep letting inferior teams hover around, eventually, it will catch up to them. It has to, right? But the bigger-picture question is, when will they fully de-couple from the Zimmer team? When will they look like an O’Connell-Sean McVay offensive juggernaut? When will they blow out opponents instead of regressing to their level of play?
Beyond that, does this team simply have to be better than Zimmer’s Vikings? Does that alone justify bringing in Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell? Does that justify Adofo-Mensah’s decision to retain the core of the roster and O’Connell’s belief in those players?
In 2004, Moss tried to leave the Washington game early because the Vikings were in a freefall. They had started the year 5-1 and ended it 8-8, backing into the playoffs. Minnesota shouldn’t back into the playoffs this year or miss them altogether. They should take advantage of a winnable NFC North and a mediocre NFC. But they need to torch inferior opponents and make us forget about the .500 teams that preceded them. Still, the Vikings can’t truly become great until the ghost of Zimmer has been exorcized. Until they regularly start feeling tempted to hit the showers early. It’s always best to get dragged into the tunnel instead of sucked into the mud.
