At 0-3, the Minnesota Vikings have a number of problems to reckon with.
Some are of the acute variety: fumbling too much or getting caught in blitzes, for instance.
Then there are the chronic issues with deeper causes and harder solves — Kirk Cousins‘ lack of protection or a patchwork secondary.
Lost in the morass of problems that ail the Vikings is their void of interior pass rush. In this regard, the 2023 Vikings are bearing the brunt of many personnel decisions the previous regime made. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah inherited a game of Whack-a-Mole with the team’s roster and salary cap, and he’s yet to get around to fixing the Vikings’ interior defensive line, whose transition to a 3-4 scheme the last two years has been anything but seamless.
Through three games, the Vikings have produced six total pressures from the five interior defensive linemen whom they’ve played. Khyiris Tonga has zero, Dean Lowry has zero, Jonathan Bullard has zero, Jaquelin Roy has zero, and Harrison Phillips has six. Four out of five have been completely skunked, and that’s a big reason why the Vikings are 24th in the league in pressure rate despite holding the league lead in blitz rate by a wide margin. Look across the border, if you dare, and check out the Green Bay Packers’ DT numbers. Former first-round picks Kenny Clark and Devonte Wyatt are spearheading an interior rush that has 36 pressures in three games.
Six times more than the Vikings. Or really, just Phillips.
The Vikings are getting what they paid for out of Phillips, who signed a modest three-year, $19.5 million contract before last season. The rest are either journeymen, aging free agents, or Day 3 draft picks. Adofo-Mensah rolled the dice on a group that could be efficient at value, but their league-low in pressures has been anything but valuable. Only one other team, the Denver Broncos, have single-digit pressures from its interior group with nine.
It doesn’t look like the Williams Wall is coming to save them.
The defensive tackle position desperately needs an injection of talent, but Adofo-Mensah can only absorb so much blame on this front. For nearly a decade, former GM Rick Spielman neglected to make real draft investments, electing for short-term triages to the position with volatile results. Sheldon Richardson made a productive cameo in 2018 and a less-productive one in 2021, while Dalvin Tomlinson was a nice piece from 2021-22. However, the Vikings acquired Michael Pierce from the Baltimore Ravens with great fanfare, only to spend one year sidelined due to COVID concerns and another year primarily injured before getting cut.
If we’re scorekeeping, Adofo-Mensah may go 50/50 on his semi-big swings with Phillips and Lowry.
Early on in the Mike Zimmer era, Spielman satiated interior defensive line needs when he pulled the right strings by picking up Linval Joseph at a big salary and journeyman Tom Johnson out of nowhere. But as Joseph and Johnson aged out, and there was no pipeline to replace them. There still isn’t.
The Vikings have not drafted a defensive tackle on Days 1-2 of the last 10 drafts. They are the only team in the NFL that hasn’t invested a pick there in that span.
As mentioned earlier, you get what you pay for at defensive tackle. Take a look at the top 10-pressure-producers of the last two seasons, via Pro Football Focus. Each of them was a first-round pick. Do the same over the previous 10 years, and you’ll only find 17% of top-10 DTs who weren’t drafted in Days 1 or 2 of the draft.
Unsurprisingly, the Vikings haven’t produced a player who was top 10 in DT pressures in that decade, while 25 other franchises have. Tom Johnson came in a close 11th in 2015, and Richardson finished 14th in 2018. You can try pointing to a defensive scheme that seemed to prioritize run defense over pocket penetration, but that was likely because the personnel rarely had the ability to move the pocket. Besides, the run defense has devolved to a bottom-10 unit each of the last three years.
Spielman averaged about one dart throw per year on a defensive tackle in Day 3 of the draft, and depending on your interpretation of the word “hit,” you could say he hit on one of them. Shamar Stephen was the darling of the 2014 draft, a seventh-round pick who started 51 games for the Vikings. But analytics also pegged him as one of the least efficient pass-rushing defensive tackles in football later in his tenure.
Draft whiffs on Jaleel Johnson, Jalyn Holmes, Jaylen Twyman, and James Lynch quickly eliminated any belief that Spielman was a defensive tackle savant.
The Vikings have seen for years what a strong interior line can do to pocket passers of Kirk Cousins’ ilk. Still, it’s been years since they had defensive players able to clear out blockers in the trenches.
It’s not the trendiest problem this team is facing. But it’s a serious one, and it goes back a full decade.
