Patrick Peterson was glum. The self-proclaimed born leader, who says he likes to operate at cruising altitude, knew the Minnesota Vikings weren’t going to land the plane. The Los Angeles Rams had beat them 30-23 the week before, ostensibly eliminating the Vikings from the playoffs. Now the Green Bay Packers had caused a crash landing, beating Minnesota 37-10 at Lambeau.
“I believe Zim is a great head coach, has a great connection with his team,” a crestfallen Peterson said after the Packers game, making one last pitch for Zimmer, who the Vikings fired a week later. “Just a lot of those games just we weren’t able to finish. At the end of the day, that’s not a coaching problem.”
Peterson was repeating Zimmer’s dubious claim that the Vikings were only a play or two away from being a playoff team in 2021. We also learned that Zimmer’s connection became frayed with many of his players. But he had supporters in the locker room, and Peterson was undoubtedly among them.
“Coaching decisions, coaching changes, that’s something that’s out of our control,” Peterson said. “That’s up to upper management. But I think Zim is definitely the guy for the job.”
Upper management disagreed. After witnessing discord and lack of communication in Rick Spielman and Zimmer’s final days, the Wilfs hired Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell to bring a defense-first, old-school organization into the 21st century.
Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell largely liked what they saw on the roster. They spent the offseason tinkering around the edges but kept the core intact, deferring money into the future to do so. Kirk Cousins will be under center again, throwing passes to Justin Jefferson and Adam Thielen. They paired Za’Darius Smith with Danielle Hunter on the edges and lined up Jordan Hicks next to Eric Kendricks.
But they still needed depth at cornerback because the previous regime had spent first-round picks on Trae Waynes, Mike Hughes, and Jeff Gladney, who did not pan out. The Vikings are in desperate need of cornerbacks, have little cap space, and may not want to spend early draft capital on them. They needed to land a free agent who could make an impact. Suddenly, Peterson had become the canary in the coal mine.
During most of the 1900s, miners would bring a caged canary into a mine shaft. If dangerous gases like carbon monoxide had collected in the tunnels, the birds would die before the miners did. It was a warning mechanism that ended in 1986, but the allegory lives on. Peterson is a Hall-of-Fame cornerback, but at 32, he only has so much time left to play. Would he return to Minnesota?
Peterson had options and wanted to be on a team that wants to win now. Would he hold it against the Vikings that they fired Mike Zimmer and hired an offensive coach? Would Peterson want to play in Ed Donatell’s revamped defense? He likes the players in the locker room, but what did he think of the new regime?
“I’m gonna stay put in Minnesota and run it back with the guys. Keep it in the North,” he said on his most recent podcast.
“I just felt it was right just to be there and grind with those guys and try to all come together for that common goal. The team is stacked. Like I always talked about last year, we just didn’t put it together in certain situations but we got even better, I believe, this year in the offseason by adding a great offensive mind in Kevin [O’Connell], adding pass rusher (Za’Darius Smith) to help Danielle [Hunter], with Ed coming from his defensive background … these guys are definitely trying to put the pieces into place and now it’s just on us, the coaching staff and the players, to go out and execute and put together the best game plan possible to get some dubs.”
Zimmer’s claim that the Vikings were almost a playoff team is a bit misleading. But it’s possible that his coaching philosophy and individual decisions, rather than personnel, kept them out of the postseason. Few new regimes will control+alt+delete a roster full of Pro Bowlers, and most of the people the Wilfs interviewed for the GM job said they wouldn’t fully reset the roster. Minnesota isn’t the first team to engage in a competitive rebuild, and a few organizations have had success recently revamping on the fly.
Peterson is endorsing the makeover by signing with the Vikings. He’s only one man, a corner on the wrong side of 30. But he’s been around long enough to differentiate between contenders and pretenders. He believes in this roster. So do Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell, whose initial shine has worn off now that they’re deferring money to keep an underachieving roster together. They didn’t need Peterson to endorse their decision to run it back in 2022, but it’s a good sign. He feels this team, which experienced a lot of turbulence last year, can finally reach cruising altitude.
