The stakes of the Minnesota Vikings’ Sunday night game against the Detroit Lions were massive, and the Vikings laid a dud, losing 31-9. However, the final score belies the game flow a little. The Vikings had the ball in field goal range down 17-9 at the end of the third quarter, but a missed field goal and two Lions touchdowns to close out the game made for an ugly score.
“That’s really the story of the game,” Vikings’ OC Wes Phillips summed up, “when you look at 0-4 in the red zone as far as scoring touchdowns and then two of those times not coming away with points at all.”
Minnesota’s red-zone performance was historic, and not in a good way.
That lone successful play was a three-yard swing pass to Aaron Jones, which set up third-and-goal from the two.
The Vikings dallied around in the red zone, accomplishing nothing, but I won’t do that in this article. Let’s break down the tape of what went wrong. We’ll look at the three goal-to-go situations the Vikings faced, where they ran 11 total plays. Their fourth red-zone drive was at the end of the first half, where they tried to control the clock and ended with a field goal.
Missed Touchdowns
In his presser, Phillips said, “There’s some plays I know Sam (Darnold) would like to have back.”
I think you can categorize four of the eleven plays as such.
The first came on Minnesota’s third offensive series, on fourth-and-goal from the three. Down 7-0 after a Lions TD, they were trying to even the score. The Lions were in man coverage, and the Vikings had a great call to beat it with Jalen Nailor and Jordan Addison at the top of the screen below.
Stacks are difficult for opponents to deal with in man coverage because you can run “rub” (or “pick” if you’re a defensive guy) routes, like the Vikings do here. Nailor does a great job of forcing his way through the DB in press coverage, and it trips up the defender in man coverage from Addison, who is wide open in the flat.
Addison is running what’s known as a “chair” route. On the route, he runs an out, turns it into a wheel, and sits down, expecting the ball towards the front pylon. However, the route also instructs the receiver to look for the ball immediately because the flat part of the route is the “hot” answer against a blitz. The pocket is a little compressed, but Darnold isn’t hot. However, he does have Addison wide open, looking right at him. He needs to pull the trigger and throw the ball.
As it is, he turns Addison down and returns to Justin Jefferson, who had created good separation on his route to the outside. Frantic in the pocket, Darnold fails to set his feet and sails the throw, which Jefferson barely gets a hand on and can’t reel in.
One failure is frustrating, but Minnesota’s next drive brought two. On the first one, second-and-goal from the seven, the Vikings run play action, which successfully gets Detroit’s linebackers to bite. The route concept is a double cross, which is difficult to defend in man coverage. Lions DBs Terrion Arnold and Kerby Joseph deserve credit for doing an excellent job “cutting” both crossers and Brandon Powell and Trent Sherfield end up covered by two players.
Still, Jefferson is wide open running the back line. Darnold has some pressure bearing down on him but has a clear lane to make the throw, and the Lions don’t hit him until after he releases it. Still, he leaves the throw high and behind. It’s a catch Jefferson should probably make, but it should have been a lot easier, and a TD.
As Phillips said, “It’s not just one guy. It never is.”
The Lions brought pressure on the next play, running a Zero Blitz. That left Jefferson one-on-one, and he roasted the CB with a double move, ending up wide open. In the pocket, Darnold double clutches the ball as the unblocked blitzer, Brian Branch, leaps to knock the pass down, then throws the ball too far, out of Jefferson’s reach.
The key to success on this play would have been to throw the ball with more loft. Darnold throws a bit of a line drive, but Jefferson was so open that a higher pass would give him time to get under it and make an easy catch. The unblocked player hits Darnold’s arm after the throw, which might have affected it. Still, the key to beating all-out pressure is getting off a quick and accurate throw under duress, and Darnold could not do that here.
On Minnesota’s third goal-to-go situation, they got the ball down to the two, where they ran the fourth-down play below. They get a pretty clear man coverage tell pre-snap, which gives the advantage to another rub route, this time on an under-and-up from Addison.
That route is good against two-high zones in the red area because it attacks the direct middle of the field. However, like the first play in this section, it also has an option to throw the ball hot to Addison immediately. The rub portion of the play works beautifully. The player covering Addison goes over Nailor’s route, leaving a ton of space. However, Darnold once again chooses not to throw it.
Holding on to the ball would have been fine had Darnold stayed with that side of the field. Nailor runs a drag-china route right in the space where Addison was open and also beats his defender. If Darnold had held on a beat, he would have had Nailor for an easy score.
Instead, stymied in this area all day, Darnold skipped to his go-to receiver in Jefferson, who the Lions had well covered on this play. Therefore, Darnold had nowhere to throw to his left. He scrambled right, and Detroit’s defenders plastered Nailor and Addison, leading to Darnold’s throw getting batted and another turnover on downs.
The Vikings had three goal-to-go situations and had players open for TDs on all three. If Darnold makes these throws, and nothing else changes, the Lions would have gotten the ball down 24-10 with 10 minutes left in the third quarter.
How the game proceeded from there likely looks vastly different from the actual result.
(Lions) Players Making plays
“The other guys get paid too” is an NFL truism that applies to this game. “Credit to them,” Phillips said. “They made the plays.”
The Vikings bungled four great opportunities to score, but the Lions stopped them cold on five other dropbacks. Let’s investigate those and what went wrong.
On the first, game context is needed. It’s second-and-goal from the three, but the refs have spotted the ball incorrectly. The Vikings break their huddle, and the refs stop them from snapping it, forcing them to back off while they reset. That might not have been an issue, except that the Vikings had some formational trickery afoot and wanted to snap the ball fast.
They put four eligible receivers to the left of Darnold on the play, with Jefferson in the backfield.
Such 4×1 sets are rare in the NFL and require an adjustment by the defense. So does the best WR in the game lining up in the backfield. The benefit of snapping the ball fast in this scenario is that the Lions wouldn’t have the time to communicate effectively, increasing the likelihood of a coverage bust.
By re-spotting the ball, the refs gave the Lions time to communicate, and they played the rep perfectly. Everyone is covered on Minnesota’s mesh concept, and Darnold chooses to live for another down, throwing the ball away.
On the next play, the Lions have switched to man coverage. Unlike the rub routes above, LB Alex Anzalone does a great job covering T.J. Hockenson, coming underneath the rub by Nailor and collisioning Hockenson, sticking with him as he runs a wheel route.
Darnold’s throw is also an issue on this play. Like on the Jefferson double move above, the ball comes out flat and is well out of Hockenson’s reach. More air would have given Hockenson the chance to win a contested catch, but it’s possible that Darnold was making a “safe” play by throwing the ball where no one could get it. Either way, it led to a fourth-down failure on the next play.
The Vikings started out with a mesh play again on the next drive. In this case, the Lions are playing man instead of zone, but they have excellent man coverage across the board. No one on the Vikings wins, so Darnold has nowhere to go with the ball. He throws a contested pass to Jefferson, but it’s knocked down.
On their third opportunity, the Vikings ran the ball on first down, setting up second-and-goal from the five. They followed that up with an extension of the run game. Jefferson came in Jet motion, and Darnold pumped a push pass to him, rolling to throw to Jones in the flat.
During Jefferson’s motion, Lions CB Amik Robertson initially followed Jefferson, indicating man coverage. Detroit was in man, but Robertson decided he couldn’t keep up with Jefferson and pushed the coverage to the safety on the other side. You can see him pump his arm in the air while running.
That meant that Robertson had his eyes in the backfield and could drive on Jones, making the tackle at the two. If Robertson had tried to follow Jefferson, the LB who was supposed to be covering Jones had bitten on the run fake, giving Jones a favorable angle to the pylon. This is a great play by an individual defender.
After that gain, the Vikings brought in 22 personnel, with Jefferson as the only receiver and C.J. Ham, Josh Oliver, Johnny Mundt, and Jones as the other eligible receivers. They lined up and ran play action, trying to spring Oliver, known for his blocking, in the flat against a man coverage player.
Instead, they got zone, and a DB was right over the top of Oliver. Darnold had a slight opportunity to sit Jefferson on a shallow route, down over the middle, but it would have been a tight window throw. Instead, Darnold pivoted out against pressure and threw the ball away.
After a run and a play with a fake pitch, the Vikings were hoping the Lions would bite on play action against clear run personnel. They didn’t, and it led to another failure.
Credit to the Lions: They made the plays.
what about the run game?
You’ve probably noticed or seen someone talk about the lack of running when the Vikings got into goal-to-go situations. They threw nine passes on their 11 red-zone plays. You’ve seen all of them in this article.
There are many reasons for the run/pass split, but one is that the Vikings simply aren’t very good at running inside the 10. RBs get hit at the line on 72.2% of runs inside the 10, and they aren’t able to do much after contact either, with 50% of plays gaining zero or fewer yards.
So what’s the deal with the red-zone run game? “Obviously, third down, fourth downs is where you’re going to get more pass generally, depending on D&D [down and distance],” Phillips answered, “It’s kind of a week-to-week thing as far as how we look at the defense, how we gameplan, and how we feel about the plays we have in the plan.”
The Vikings had first-and-goal from the five twice and ran it with Cam Akers both times. The first play, a Duo run, led to a bounce read, but Addison lost his block on the edge, and two Lions DBs were able to combine on the stop. The second was inside zone, but Risner couldn’t reach the 2i he was up against, leading to a run for no gain.
It’s also notable that despite the high pass rate, the Vikings didn’t abandon the idea of running. They incorporated the threat of the run into many of their designs.
Take their second-and-goal from the three, the one with Jefferson in the backfield. On the play, the Vikings are in 13 personnel with three TEs, a very run-focused personnel package. They had hoped that they could catch the Lions unaware by putting in heavy personnel and snapping the ball fast out of a funky formation. However, the refs robbed them of that chance.
Or how about their first-and-goal from the seven? There, they run play action, and the Lions LBs bite, with the defense leaving Jefferson open over the middle. Notably, the Vikings are in 11 personnel but have Sherfield and Powell in the game, their best blocking WRs. The personnel indicates a higher chance of a run, and the LBs keyed off of that. That’s using the threat of the run effectively, and it would have worked if Darnold and Jefferson had connected.
Minnesota used heavy personnel again on third-and-goal from the two, and the Lions sniffed out the play action. The Vikings used a personnel grouping other than Jefferson-Addison-Nailor-Hockenson, their best pass-catching group, on five of their six first- and second-down plays. Their goal was to force the Lions into heavy personnel and hopefully stretch them out against the pass. They did the first but weren’t so successful at the second.
Where the Vikings did have — or rather should have had — success was on third and fourth down. Of the four near TDs, three were on third or fourth down. All three of those plays had the Jefferson-Addison-Nailor-Hockenson combination in the game. As Phillips said, those downs skew pass-heavy, especially when running from the three, seven, and two instead of the one.
From studying the tape, it’s clear that the Vikings planned to pass out of heavy personnel because they expected the Lions to respond by putting heavy bodies on the field. The Lions did, so the Vikings got the looks they wanted. However, the plays failed, and the Vikings didn’t get the results they wanted on early downs. That led to late-down passing, and near misses on those plays bled expected points away from Minnesota’s total.
conclusion
The Vikings had great red-zone opportunities against the Lions but failed to capitalize on them. They could not run the ball successfully, and Detroit’s defense was on top of most of the fakes Minnesota tried to run. Still, the Vikings gave themselves a great chance on four of the 11 plays but couldn’t connect.
With QB Sam Darnold missing open receivers on all three goal-to-go opportunities, the Vikings could easily have come away with 21 points instead of just three in those chances, completely changing the game’s complexion. Instead, the three points they could score meant an embarrassing 31-9 loss to the Lions.
It left a bitter taste in fans’ mouths as the Vikings head back to SoFi Stadium to take on the Los Angeles Rams, the only other team that beat them this season.
