The Minnesota Vikings’ plan for their three tight ends is becoming clear through three games. In the past, we’ve watched Vikings teams use one tight end as a primary member of a default offense, with other tight ends serving as backups or secondary options. Kyle Rudolph would play every snap that involved a tight end, and Rhett Ellison would join the fray if a second tight end were needed. This new iteration of the team takes a different approach.
If you’ll allow me a tangent, specialization is an important concept in economics. Economies perform better when labor can be specialized. If one person spends her whole life farming, she’ll get pretty good at it. Take 10 people, give them 10 jobs to do, and they can divide the labor evenly. Give each of those 10 people one task to do for their whole lives, and they’ll become experts.
Football specializes in the same way, which separates it from other sports. In baseball, everyone hits, and everyone fields (aside from designated hitters and pitchers). In basketball, everyone plays offense and defense, as with soccer, hockey, and so on. Only football has a rigid divide between positions. It gives us as viewers an opportunity to be lazy with how we view players.
Imagine a generic tight end. What did your brain conjure? Probably an unassuming blocker who sometimes catches checkdowns in the mold of Jimmy Kleinsasser. Someone who revels in dirty work. Maybe you’ve heard him described as a “lunch pail guy” for one reason or another. If you’re a fantasy buff, perhaps your brain immediately painted a picture of George Kittle or Rob Gronkowski, who do it all. But tight ends come in plenty of styles, from “move” tight ends like Mike Gesicki to blocking specialists like David Morgan.
So what do the Vikings want? A glorified bulky wide receiver, a technically eligible extra offensive lineman, or something in between? The answer is all of the above. Each of Minnesota’s three tight ends, Ben Ellefson, Irv Smith Jr., and Johnny Mundt, has their own designated role. The borders between them aren’t rigid, but the bulk of their job is specialized, only diverging enough to keep from being predictable.
Ben Ellefson, The Blocker
Ellefson’s role, predictably, is mostly as a blocker. His blocking skill looks more like an offensive lineman’s than a tight end’s. The Vikings routinely ask him to take defensive ends one-on-one. That’s a mismatch and may be unwise against teams with more elite edge rushers than the Detroit Lions have, but Ellefson was highly successful on Sunday.
That pays its dividends elsewhere. Imagine a standard 4-3 front with four defensive linemen against a standard one tight end formation. If a tight end can take one of the defensive linemen, you are left with a five-on-three matchup with the rest of your offensive line. That buys you two double teams (or two combination blocks, depending on the run play’s design). If, say, you had a late second-round rookie starting at right guard, giving him help from his teammates every time the tight end can beat the defensive end is very helpful.
The Vikings also like to use 21 personnel (two running backs including C.J. Ham, a tight end, and two wide receivers) in their run game. Ham is a good lead blocker, but Ellefson can also perform the role. Linebackers often react to the lead blocker when fitting the run, and with two skill players capable of performing the task, it gets that much harder to read.
Irv Smith Jr., The Receiver
Smith is on the other end of the spectrum. He’s something of a public enemy in Vikings fans’ consciousness because of a couple of key drops. I got a lot more depth on Smith’s capability as a receiver after Week 2, but suffice it to say he is the best separator of the group and by far the fastest, with a 40 time over a tenth of a second faster than Mundt’s. It allows him to do things like this: separate from a corner and make a diving catch, assuaging a lot of concerns about his catching ability.
The drop against the Philadelphia Eagles hurt, and while Week 3’s drop was less egregious, it dug into an open wound. Still, it’s important to remember that catch rate is not that stable. Drops do not universally lead to more drops. A streak of one drop two games in a row is not enough of a pattern to worry the issue will continue. But it can; the embarrassment of the moment can disrupt a player’s focus. Even Terrell Owens had drop issues late in his career. Nobody is immune to it. Smith is now in a pivotal moment in his career. Can he pull it together and find consistency? If so, call it a forgettable blip. If not, it could define him.
Still, Smith is the most dynamic receiver in the tight end room. He’s not quite as quick as a wide receiver, but in exchange, he can still block. He’s not the blocker that Ellefson is, nor is he as consistent as Mundt, but it’s worth pointing out that he had key blocks in both of the Vikings’ rushing touchdowns, alongside other major rushing successes from Sunday’s game.
This is especially important to set up opportunities like that corner route above. Even without a literal run fake, Smith can employ a hard inside first step (that looks like an angle block) to set up the linebacker covering him.
Ellefson doesn’t quite have this ability. While he did have a long catch in Sunday’s game, it was more of a schematic success than it was a reflection of his particular ability to separate.
JOHNNY MUNDT, The EVERYTHING
Mundt is not as good a receiver as Smith, though he may be a blocker on Ellefson’s level. That’s unexpected but certainly welcome. At any rate, Mundt does a little bit of everything for the Vikings. He blocks, he can separate downfield sometimes, and he can break a tackle or two after the catch. In a sense, it makes him the most valuable tight end on the roster. Mundt on the field tells the defense nothing about the Vikings’ intentions.
Here he is executing both of the blocks that Ellefson threw elsewhere in the game and a kick-out block for good measure. It’s hard to overstate how well Mundt played in this game, albeit in fairly unglamorous duty.
Here’s Mundt getting separation as well, and in a truly earned way. A lot of tight end catches are open by virtue of offensive scheme and defensive response, but Mundt found himself open downfield plenty.
He’s not as specialized as Ellefson, and Smith was asked to go downfield far more often. Mundt straddles the line, does a little bit of everything, and does it well. As the versatile piece, he can get more involved than someone like Ellefson and also serve as a backup to either player in the event of an injury.
So how does this all even out? Aside from Week 1, the Vikings have preferred to have the more dynamic pass-catching weapon on the field. Smith played sparingly against Green Bay but has folded in much more than Mundt in the two weeks since, with Ellefson only playing in specialized run-only situations (or when you want the defense to think that).
In total, Smith has almost made up the snap count deficit from Week 1 and most likely will in Week 4 against the New Orleans Saints. But the overall counts shouldn’t be that important. The Vikings clearly have a plan for their tight ends. Between the three of them, they have a main and alternate for anything you could ask a tight end to do. They can specialize, and therefore maximize each job, only mixing up the roles enough to keep the defense on its toes. We don’t need to wait for its potential to come to its fruition; the Vikings are doing exactly what they want.
