Vikings Completely Disrespected in Defensive Line Rankings
You know the old saying: “You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” That’s the exact feeling we can apply toward PFF right now.
It’s hard to be super upset at them with where they ranked the Minnesota Vikings’ new-look defensive line in a recent piece by Zoltan Buday, given that they’re not really ever very harsh on our favorite football club. By no means did I expect to open the piece by PFF and see the Vikings as the best defensive line on paper in the league (especially since the Pittsburgh Steelers were given away as the #1 on the ranking in the title), nor did I even expect to see them top 3, or even top 5.
I also did not expect to have to scroll as long as I did to find them, as I eventually did when I found them ranked as the 16th-best defensive line going into the 2025 NFL season.
It’s easy to say, as someone who only writes about one singular team, especially it being my favorite one, that a publication that covers all 32 probably missed the mark on this one. But for a company as big as they are, and given the fact that their metrics are used in the NFL for real data and broadcast aid on NBC’s Sunday Night Football during player introductions, this almost seems irresponsible to publish from the perspective of where the Vikings rank.
Maybe I am just too much of a man, but I really feel like a starting defensive line of:
- Jonathan Greenard
- Andrew Van Ginkel
- Jonathan Allen
- Javon Hargrave
- Harrison Phillips
…is a bit better than the “16th” best defensive line on paper, since that’s the only thing we can base it on for a 2025 rankings. That list doesn’t even include Dallas Turner, which I understand is hard to factor him into things so much since it’s been hard to give him time on the field so far since the starting duo of Van Ginkel and Greenard was so good during Turner’s rookie season of 2024.
Look, I understand there’s a lot of good defensive fronts in the National Football League, but since the only way we can rank units in 2025 is “on paper”, seeing as a snap hasn’t been played yet and won’t be for another two months and some change, the Vikings new-look defensive side of the trenches deserves a bit more than dead-average.
It looks like it’ll have to be the Vikings defying the Big Football media’s offseason narratives again, and this time, it’ll be the defensive line showing PFF as to why they’re a force to be reckoned with. This isn’t the first time that PFF very weirdly discredited the Vikings’ defensive abilities; last season, they gave them the 25th-best pass rushing team grade in the NFL.
I also understand that for the frequency that they blitzed, they probably missed the mark on PFF’s super new and nerdy analytics for efficiency and whatnot, but the Vikings’ pass rush was like, VERY OBVIOUSLY better than the 25th-best pass rushing unit in the league in 2024.
Well, here’s to hoping that the Vikings are good enough in PFF’s eyes in their super-duper-ultra-jacked-throttled-sicknasty-new-era-advanced analytics, because that’s how you determine the best of the best in the game of football in the year of 2025.
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