Over Last 2 Seasons, Dalvin Cook Owns Duo of Impressive Stats
Dustin Baker
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Per average annual salary, Minnesota Vikings tailback Dalvin Cook is the league’s fourth-highest-paid running back. He trails Christian McCaffrey, Ezekiel Elliott, and Alvin Kamara in this regard. Before 2020, Cook experienced burdensome injuries, so his paycheck is a notch below the aforementioned three men, although McCaffrey missed 13 games during the pandemic season.
The Vikings started the 2020 season with a dubious 1-5 record before surging back to .500. When that surge occurred, Cook was briefly mentioned as an MVP candidate as he led the NFL in rushing yards and touchdowns at the time. He even won the NFL’s Offensive Player of the Month award in November.
And that cascade wasn’t necessarily limited to that month — Cook has been performing as one of the best in the business for the last two seasons. Out of the gate from Florida State, 2017 and 2018, Cook missed 53% of all Vikings game due to injuries. The bulk of that mark was from his rookie season when he tore his ACL. He gained an “injury-prone” distinction, and that propelled many Vikings fans to decry his eligibility for a contract extension. Ultimately, the Vikings brass — chiefly general manager Rick Spielman — disagreed, paying Cook a robust five-year, $63 million deal with $28 million in guaranteed money.
Cook will be a free agent in 2026.
That sum of dollars seems quite fair as of now. Indeed, Cook had injury hardships during his freshman and sophomore campaigns, but his last two seasons have been dazzling. He leads the NFL in two impactful marks.
First, Cook leads all NFL players in yards from scrimmage per game.
No NFL player accrues more yards per game than Cook amid the last two years. He’s missed three games to injury since 2019, and that enables the Tennessee Titans’ Derrick Henry to carry the total yards-from-scrimmage trophy. But in a per-game capacity, it’s Cook by a smidgen.
Of note: The drop-off from Cook and Henry — to everyone else — is vast. Cook and Henry earn essentially the same amount of average-annual-salary dollars, yet their respective production mandates they should be on top of the earning brackets rather than fourth and fifth.
That’s if one believes in paying halfbacks top dollar. Some folks — mainly the analytics crowd — believe that running backs are interchangeable and that passing, passing, and more passing is the way to go. To each community their own.
Next on Cook, he is certainly not a yards-only monger. He carves up the endzone, too. No other player in the industry has more games with at least one touchdown scored than the 26-year-old Cook since 2019.
Again, Henry is dangerously close here, but this is a further indication that the supremacy of running backs is “Cook, Henry, and everyone else” during the last two seasons.
It’s also commendable that Todd Gurley makes an appearance in these rankings. Gurley is currently a free agent, and most football brains presume that his days of a bonafide bell-cow running back are over. However, Gurley quietly graced the endzone in the last two years. Fantasy football managers can attest.
The Vikings face a make-or-break season in 2021. Head coach Mike Zimmer enters his eighth year with Minnesota, and he will need a playoff win to partake in the 2022 season, or so Vikings fans believe. To date, the Zimmer Vikings basically alternate good-to-great seasons with mediocre ones.
Zimmer’s fate is likely tied to quarterback Kirk Cousins. The former Washington Football Team quarterback was signed by Spielman in 2018 as “the answer” at the quarterback position, but the team has reached the playoffs in just one season out of three under his leadership.
A healthy, ultra-productive Cook — as seen in 2019 and 2020 — will go a long way in securing Zimmer and Cousins’ services beyond 2021.