With the Brian Flores Riddle Solved, The Vikings Move Ahead with a New Problem on Defense
Brian Flores is going to be sticking around in the Twin Cities, as Janik Eckardt noted not too long ago.
Kevin O’Connell took some time to chat with Pro Football Talk, confirming that the defensive coordinator is coming back: “When we identified him as the guy that we wanted to bring in coming off the 2022 season, he has been fantastic. Scheme, relationship with players, my personal relationship with him, how we build our team. I think Brian Flores should be a head coach in the National Football League. He will be again. . . . But, at the same time, we feel like we’ve got some unfinished business together in Minnesota and we can’t wait to get to work for 2025.”
Good news for the Vikings, bad news for the individual coach. As O’Connell notes, Flores is more than capable (and deserving) of becoming a head coach, but that’s an eventuality that will need to wait.
Flores’ debut season as the DC involved pushing the Vikings up to 13th in the NFL by allowing an average of 21.3 points against per game. He then improved his side of the ball even further, finishing last season with the NFL’s 5th-best defense by allowing an average of 19.5 points against per game. Do the good times keep rolling with further improvement? That’s the issue that’s now in front of Flores and the Vikings.
The Brian Flores Riddle & The 2025 Vikings Defense
Consider the lay of the land in terms of how things look for a starting defense. Minnesota has the potential to lose a lot of starters. Check it out:
| EDGE Jonathan Greenard | DT Harrison Phillips | DT? | EDGE Andrew Van Ginkel | |
| LB Blake Cashman | LB Ivan Pace Jr. | |||
| CB? | CB? | FS? | S Josh Metellus | CB? |
Obviously, the front is looking quite a bit better than the secondary. The edge rusher tandem is looking strong, especially since Dallas Turner is coming back to prove that he can live up to his No. 17 draft slot. Plus, the linebackers are excellent and Harrison Phillips is a strong building block at defensive tackle.
The secondary, in contrast, leaves plenty of reason for concern. Right now, Metellus is the only one providing the continuity, but it appears as though Byron Murphy Jr. will come back. If so, then Flores gets to continue working alongside his two most versatile defensive backs as the team looks to improve what is too often some leaky coverage.
Yet again, the Vikings led the NFL in blitzing percentage. What’s notable, however, is that Brian Flores sent an extra player(s) with far less frequency, likely due to having a more potent collection of edge rushers.
The 2023 Vikings leaned on the blitz a stunning 51.5% of the time. Fast forward into 2024 and that number drops down to 38.9% of the time.
Sending a blitz — though exciting — is a classic case of stealing from Peter to pay for Paul. Yes, there’s the upside of the blitzer(s) hitting the quarterback before a pass can be completed, but there’s the downside of losing another player in coverage. Go ahead and think to what the Eagles just accomplished in the Super Bowl for an example of how potent a defense can be when there only needs to be four defenders to create pressures, hits, and sacks.
All of the sudden, the pass coverage gets to work with seven players as the QB needs to avoid the four players who are getting into the backfield.
At a very basic level, Brian Flores isn’t going to change (and nor should he). He will continue being a creative strategist who leans toward being aggressive. These characteristics are paramount to what allows him to succeed as a defensive strategist, which is to say nothing of the leadership he provides alongside the sophistication of his scheme.
The NFL, though, is an evolving league that constantly demands that its coaches tweak, adjust, and, ultimately, improve. Flores can’t pursue an identical strategy for 2025 and expect to get excellent results. Rather, he’ll need to keep growing as he morphs his defense into one that works with the personnel that ends up in the Twin Cities (both the carryover players and those being grafted in during the coming months).
Most notably, there’s going to be some changes in the defensive backfield. One wonders if a high-end corner or two could lead to a greater reliance on man coverage. Minnesota finished 5th-worst in the NFL in passing yards allowed last season, an area that should be a focus. The Vikings are hard to run on and hard to score on, but being able to shut down the pass with greater frequency certainly appears to be a key part of the next step.
Does that mean acquiring the pass rushers and/or coverage players who can allow Brian Flores to adjust his scheme to make pass completions harder to come by? Or, perhaps, is part of the solution continuing to develop the in-house talent? All of the above?
Currently, the Vikings are sitting on roughly $58 million in cap space alongside four draft picks for the 2025 NFL Draft. Look for both of those numbers to shift around before it’s all said and done.
Brian Flores will turn 44 toward the end of February.
Editor’s Note: Information from Pro Football Reference and Over the Cap helped with this piece.
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K. Joudry is the Senior Editor for Vikings Territory and PurplePTSD. He has been covering the Vikings full time since the summer of 2021. He can be found on Twitter, as a co-host for Notes from the North, and as the proprietor at The Vikings Gazette, a humble Vikings Substack.