This “Vikings Rumor” Is More than Meets the Eye
Tom Woldum
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Like any diligent football fan / rumormonger would, I sat down at my computer yesterday and typed “Vikings Rumors” into my search bar. The number one result? A headline sourced to Purple PTSD’s sister site, Vikings Territory, headlined “NFL Analyst Claims Vikings Have ‘Colossal Problem’”.
The article from Dustin Baker describes Heavy.com NFL analyst Matt Lombardo’s take on the Viking offensive line—in which he breaks down not just the Vikings narrow victory over New Orleans last Sunday while pointing out the Purple O-Line did not, to the naked eye, overly impress during said victory.
My initial reaction was, this guy is saying the offensive line is a problem, and that qualifies as a rumor? Surely this is an unmitigated fact—as it has been for years. The line is extremely young, extremely vulnerable, has allowed a great deal of unwanted pressure on our quarterback while busting very few holes for Dalvin Cook. We’ve all heard this song before and it’s part of an old, tired musical that risen past off-off-Broadway.
In his article, Dustin conceded that the line probably didn’t have its greatest day against New Orleans, but, being the highly regarded journalist and editorial leader that he is, he called bull on the idea that there’s a ‘Colossal Problem’ here, pointing out that the line’s Pro Football Focus grades for the season are well above those of recent Mike Zimmer-led teams.
In this day and age, there are far too many advanced metrics available to simply rely on our own eyes anymore. Matt Lombardo saw what I saw—a team that was failing to find space for a premier running back and allowing tremendous pressure on the passer. But the numbers have a way of flipping the script, and Dustin was clearly onto something by looking a bit closer. Those PFF grades, by the way, for the season through four games, are:
LT — Christian Darrisaw: 78.1 (8th out of 80 NFL tackles)
LG — Ezra Cleveland: 62.7 (29th of 71 guards)
C — Garrett Bradbury: 61.9 (18th of 36 centers)
RG — Ed Ingram: 60.9 (35th of 71)
RT — Brian O’Neill: 73.8 (16th of 80)
As a group, Pro Football Focus graded Minnesota’s offensive line as the 26th best out of 32 teams after the 2020 season (concurring with our collective eyeballs) and found a slight improvement to 23rd in 2021. The individual grades show continued improvement from our young linemen to the point where they’re looking downright average as a group (as opposed to woefully subpar). Meanwhile, our tackles Christian Darrisaw and Brian O’Neill appear to be, dare I say, good.
Linemen are generally (though not always) notoriously slow to develop, and we’ve seen Cleveland and Bradbury (and previous starter / current backup Oli Udoh) manhandled at times over the previous couple of seasons—but the stats are telling our eyes to chill out a little bit and give these young linemen a chance to continue their trajectory of improvement.
If you’d like a further dose of positive thinking, let’s look at another source. ESPN Analytics, utilizing the NFL’s Next Gen Stats tracking data, has developed a “win rate” statistics for grading linemen on both sides of the ball. This tool ranked the Vikings O-Line in 2021 as #25 among the 32 teams in pass-block “win rate”, and #13 in run-block “win rate”.
This corresponds nicely with the eye test—last year it seemed to me that Dalvin Cook had plenty of holes from an average-ish group of run-blockers, and added his own ability to excel to his usual high level. And, it seemed that this group could not drop into pass block protection successfully to save their lives. We (and in particular Kirk Cousins) needed to see improvement there in 2022.
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Well, guess what? ESPN’s data says we’ve gotten just that—improvement not just in pass blocking, but both sides of the ball. Through the first 4 games, ESPN Analytics say that Minnesota’s run blocking win rate ranks 7th in the NFL, and the pass-blocking win rates is also 7th.
In other words, those numbers are screaming out at me and Matt Lombardo and any other knee-jerk here-we-go-againers out there that this line has vastly improved over a season ago. In particular, it points to Darrisaw as the NFL’s number one run-blocking tackle, with a scintillating 84%-win rate.
This begs the question, why do the Vikings keep pounding Cook up the middle instead of giving him a heavy diet of off-tackle work behind the young man who is better than anyone at his position thusfar in 2022? That’s a question for another day.
Also for another day would be any discussion of how the ESPN Analytics sees our pass-rush win rate on defense. (Spoiler alert: we’re in the bottom three of the league—which definitely aligns nicely with the eye test so far in 2022).
The bottom line is that this offensive line is looking mediocre at best to the naked eye, but it’s looking somewhere between mediocre to Very Good according to the advanced analytics. The trajectory is going in the right direction, and Darrisaw is a Pro-Bowler-in-Waiting. Hopefully our eyes will soon begin to appreciate what the data already does.