The Minnesota Vikings are in a great spot coming out of their bye week. With a 5-1 record, they have a 2.5-game lead in the NFC North. They’re a game out for home-field advantage in the playoffs. With the rest of the conference looking like a bad Halloween costume, there’s a realistic chance the road to the Super Bowl runs through Minneapolis for the first time since 1998.
But anyone who believes this is a finished product is fooling themselves. The Vikings have been winning in the margins, but there’s still work to be done on offense. Kevin O’Connell probably spent the bye week fine-tuning his scheme, but there’s no guarantee that he will emerge out of the bye week screaming, “It’s alive! IT’S ALIIIIIIVE!!!”
Instead, this may be a group of players who aren’t a fit for O’Connell’s offense.
That would be concerning, given that this was the No. 1 reason for keeping the roster together last offseason. Ryan Poles hit the Blow It Up Button in Chicago, but the Vikings decided to go the other direction. They kicked money down the road and kept the nucleus in place.
That approach has worked in the standings but not with the offense. The Vikings currently rank 13th with 23.2 points per game this season and are tied for 15th with 5.4 yards per play. Those numbers are lower than last year when the Vikings ranked 14th in points per game (25) and 13th in yards per play (5.7).
You might look at those numbers and think this isn’t a big deal, but that wasn’t the narrative coming into the season.
The Vikings of the past few years were an underachieving group, and they believed Mike Zimmer was the leading cause of that. While Brian O’Neill and Eric Kendricks lamented his reluctance to say hello in the hallway, the organization was also leery of Zimmer’s archaic ways on offense. He preferred running the ball, controlling the clock, and essentially playing not to lose.
For all downsides to Zimmer’s preferences on offense, he seemed to find a middle ground. Kevin Stefanski may have been a little too run-heavy in 2019, but he took advantage of Kirk Cousins’ ability to throw the ball downfield. According to Pro Football Focus, Cousins logged a 121.5 passer rating on 69 attempts of 20 yards or more, which was the second-highest in the NFL.
Cousins had an off-year in 2020 but returned to form last year. He ranked second with a 120.7 passer rating, third with a 96.2 PFF grade, and had 12.7% of his throws travel 20 yards or more downfield.
You would think O’Connell would see these numbers and give Cousins the freedom to sling it, but it hasn’t worked out this way. In fact, Matthew Stafford had just 11.1% of his attempts travel 20 yards or more last season – tied with Mac Jones for the 22nd-highest rate in the NFL. The year before, Jared Goff had just 7.8% of his passes go for 20 yards or more – 37th in the NFL.
So far this season, Cousins has just 6.1% of his attempts to travel 20 or more yards downfield. That rate is 35th out of 36 qualifying quarterbacks. The only QB behind him, Matt Ryan, just got benched. Additionally, Cousins is only posting a 74.1 passer rating on those throws, which is 20th among qualifiers.
This becomes even stranger, considering O’Connell has used plenty of play-action this season. Cousins ranked fourth in the NFL with a 116 passer rating on play-action attempts in 2021 and fifth with a 122.3 passer rating in 2020. Since 2017, Cousins has ranked no lower than seventh in passer rating off play-action passes. That’s been reflected in O’Connell’s play calling with a 33.9% play-action rate.
If O’Connell is playing to Cousins’ strengths and the results aren’t there, then what’s the problem? It could be that the supporting cast isn’t what we believe it to be.
Justin Jefferson has been as advertised in “The Cooper Kupp Role.” But the rest of the receivers haven’t seen the same success.
Adam Thielen has 284 yards receiving, which is the lowest total through the first six games of a season since he was a special teams player in 2015. His PFF receiving grade ranks 47th among qualifying receivers, and his 1.20 yards per route run is the lowest of his career.
It’s been so long since Thielen has been targeted that you may have forgotten he’s from Minnesota. At age 32, it’s a troubling development for a receiver who will make nearly $20 million in 2023.
K.J. Osborn and Irv Smith Jr. have also been disappointments. Osborn ranks 84th among 93 qualifying receivers with 0.84 yards per route run, while Smith ranks 36th out of 43 qualifying tight ends with 0.96 yards per route run.
We haven’t even talked about Dalvin Cook, who has turned into a boom-or-bust runner at this stage of his career.
According to Football Outsiders, Cook has a 50% success rate on his runs this year, defined as the number of yards a running back gets in terms of down and distance. That rate ranks 25th out of 39 qualifying running backs with a minimum of 60 carries this season. His defensive DVOA, which adjusts the matchup considering the strength of schedule, ranks 15th among that group.
So where does this leave O’Connell? Does he shelve his scheme for something the Vikings are more adaptable to? Or does he leave his scheme, realizing these aren’t the players he’s chosen to run it?
The answer is a little bit of both. O’Connell can continue doing some of the things he’s doing by increasing the play action rate and C.J. Ham’s snaps. But a complete overhaul of his system would shelve the narrative that got him hired in the first place.
In reality, O’Connell is like a college football coach who just took over a big program. The players in place weren’t the ones he recruited, and it takes time to build that up. While most coaches refer to this as “Year 0,” O’Connell walked into a situation where he didn’t walk into an empty cupboard.
The best option for O’Connell is to work with what he has and make changes either at the trade deadline or in the offseason. That could mean drafting a receiver like Jordan Addison, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, or Kayshon Boutte. It could also mean taking a running back like Jahmyr Gibbs or Bijan Robinson. It also could mean getting aggressive to take a quarterback.
It could be a while before O’Connell completely fixes the offense. But for now, he needs to find a middle ground.
