Why Aren’t the Vikings Getting Any Respect?

My job as a Vikings writer is to peruse the local and national media for articles that pertain to our favorite team, select the most relevant/interesting and essentially just… Reword them for you guys (The cat is out of the bag!). Now, I’m relatively knew to this gig, so I don’t have a ton of history to compare this to as a writer, but I do as a fan. So, as a fan, I’m relatively used to the Vikings not getting a ton of coverage by the national media, as they tend to ignore “fly over/under country” because it just makes sense for them to do so (From a population perspective). That’s not the gripe that I have today, however. The gripe I have today is in the actual coverage itself, from sites like PFF or Sports Illustrated (Namely, Monday Morning Quarterback). Essentially, these sites are really, really under-selling the Vikings chances in 2017 and I’m here to ask… Why?!?

Like I’ve said, I’ve been writing about the Vikings “professionally” for only two years, but I’ve been talking about the Vikings online since the internet existed. I really don’t think that fans have been as genuinely excited about the team like they are now since back in the Favre days. I say genuinely, because there are always those who think that “This year is the year!”, but this season feels like there’s a genuine chance that the Vikes might make a go of it. I tend to agree as the Vikings are pretty much stacked at every position on the roster. Think about it, before injuries caught up with them last season they were nearly untouchable. They went 5-0, before ending the season 3-8, and they fell apart mostly because their offensive line was a mess. That problem has mostly been solved, thanks to the addition of free agents Riley Reiff and Mike Remmers at the tackle spots and the drafting of Pat Elflein and Danny Isidora at the center and guard spot, respectively. On paper, at least, this unit seems to be at least average. Something that us fans were wishing for last season… “If only we had a decent offensive line then we’d be able to…”, well, now we do.

In addition, we’ve added depth everywhere else but most importantly at the running back position. The Vikings backfield seems poised to add something to the offense that they haven’t really had since Adrian Peterson took over in 2007, a passing game/aspect. By drafting Dalvin Cook and bringing in free agent Latavius Murray, the Vikings maintained the ability to house the ball on every play while also adding a pass and catch angle that they, again, didn’t have before. So, again, I ask, where is all this hate coming from? For your consideration, I’ll show you a couple articles that are essentially putting the Vikings in the middle of the pack in terms of predictions for 2017.

First up is an analysis of the Vikings defense by P(ro) F(ootball) F(ocus). Remember, that again before the draft, the Vikings defense was essentially the class of the NFL. They’ve lost Captain Munnerlyn, sure, but they’ve added depth at the corner position just in terms of players growing/evolving into their roles. Despite keeping every starter from 2016, PFF graded the Vikings defense as 17th in the league right now. The fellas at DailyNorseman took issue (rightly so) with this and ended up interviewing Eric Eager (The fellas responsible) about it. His reasoning?

“It starts with grading each player on each play each game. Then some math to normalize, and then figuring out how much each action is worth.” So it is a player focused process and other stats are team based, an apples and oranges type comparison. We know that Barr had bad games and injuries, Smith’s play declined due to injury, MacKenzie seemed lost at times when he was forced to play, etc. Those individual grades can bring down the unit even though as a defense, they were quite effective.

Sam Monson, the PFF Lead Analyst added:

“We’re grading every player individually not just looking at results of the play which can mislead at times.” He even has the Vikings defense ranked higher at #11 on his end of season rankings. PFF explains on his rankings that the “overall cumulative grades as a starting point and makes necessary subjective adjustments to account for things that aren’t captured in the grading, such as injuries.”

So. This is based on individual player not their combined effort or really, what most of us think of a defense as. So, player to player, somehow the Vikings have the 17th best unit in the NFL based on their play in 2016. Perhaps having all 11 starters back hurt them as other teams can bring in players that haven’t played yet and use that ambiguity to their advantage, but really this just goes to show you how things from PFF can be taken out of context and are really, truly subjective. It also goes to show you why Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer doesn’t really buy into PFF as a whole.

In 2014, Zimmer said:

“The last thing that I want to talk about before I let you guys go is this Pro Football Focus thing, I know everybody wants to get the scoop on this, but quite honestly there’s not really anybody… I look at the grades and I can’t tell you what a 0.7 is or anything like that, but I know that the people that are grading our games and our defenses and our offenses, they don’t know if the tackle gets beat inside, if we weren’t sliding out to the nickel or who our guys are supposed to cover. I guarantee they don’t know who is in our blitz package and what they are supposed to do. I would just ask everybody to take that with a grain of salt, including our fans. We as coaches get paid a whole bunch of money to do the jobs that we do, evaluate the players that we evaluate and grade them how we grade them and not based on someone else.”

That’s always been my point, too. How can you grade something when you don’t know what the call was going to be? If you don’t know intention, you can’t give an objective grade, you’re giving a subjective grade and I think people see numbers and associate PFF with objectivity because it’s math. But, it’s really just the closest people, who aren’t part of the Vikings organization, can get to objectivity. But the gap that exists does lead to them getting it wrong a lot, or just their overall approach. Because some things in football just can’t be measured. One of those things being, morale or effort.

The Vikings defense did give up a bit after the bye. After the Offense kept them on the field too long because the offensive line fell apart. While the comments made by Rhett Ellison’s father have been written off as mostly sour grapes, there is some truth to what he said about the defense taking issue with coach Zimmer’s approach, something that Zimmer has aimed to correct during this off-season. But, I find it hard to believe that this unit wouldn’t end up being a top ten at the very least, considering how long they’ve played together as a unit and how many of them are top tier at their position. The improvement of Trae Waynes behind Terrence Newman and the fact that Xavier Rhodes is emerging as a top five corner should show that this team has a scary unit at the corner position. Then you have Danielle Hunter, Linval Joseph and Everson Griffen on the defensive line, etc. So, I find this ranking pretty laughable, to be honest.

I just find it hard to consider the Vikings defense as run of the mill from ANY perspective. But apparently, PFF’s not alone when it comes to ranking the Vikings as such. There’s the Monday Morning Quarterback “Pre-Season Power Rankings” that came out at the end of last month. The Vikings appeared as the 16th best (Or worst?) team there, and I’ll just copy and past author Peter King’s reasoning behind that…

Why I have the Vikings 16th: Classic team that could go in either direction. If Sam Bradford flourishes in Pat Shurmur’s system, if Cook confirms his high first-round talent with an impact year, if the Vikings can build up a strong playoff résumé entering a brutal post-Thanksgiving stretch, and if young defensive stalwarts like Danielle Hunter can continue their ascension, this will be a playoff team. Big ifs, but all certainly possible. One look in the rear-view mirror here. Kudos to GM Rick Spielman for making the tough call last Labor Day weekend and trading a 2017 first-round pick for Bradford. With the short- and long-term uncertainty surrounding Teddy Bridgewater’s knee injury (to this day), Spielman gave up what became the 14th pick in 2017 for short- and long-term insurance. Bradford delivered in up-and-down fashion, typical of his career, but there was no passer in this draft putting up numbers like Bradford’s in 2016: 71.6 percent accuracy, 20 touchdowns to five interceptions, 99.3 rating. Having a quarterback is why the Vikings will contend.

How are those ‘Big if’s’? He’s essentially saying… “If Players X, Y and Z continue to play like they’ve played, then this is a playoff team”. Okay, well, 16 teams don’t make the playoffs. So, while he does consider us a contender by saying that Sam Bradford’s 2016 numbers mean that they’re a contender… Again, I really just don’t understand the ranking. Perhaps people worry that the Vikings won’t be able to contend without Adrian Peterson? Or perhaps the post-Bye disaster that was 2016 is too fresh in people’s minds. I understand that, I guess, but once you realize that that disaster came from a combination of injury and a lack of depth, mostly at the offensive line position and the morale implosion that that caused… You’ll realize that it was based on factors that shouldn’t/can’t happen again. On top of that, considering that the depth has been corrected this off-season, you’d think that we’d get more respect than that.

To be honest with you, I blame most of this on a lack of knowledge about the team. It’s mostly an ignorance issue. The Vikings are Minnesota’s team, and people don’t think about Minnesota that often. Outside of a bunch of movies from the 90’s (‘Fargo’, ‘The Mighty Ducks’, ‘Untamed Heart’, Whatever that Arnold movie about that action figure was called) Minnesota has been mostly invisible since … Forever. So, when you have a team that represents that invisibility, you end up with people who don’t really follow the in’s and out’s of it. ESPN has been falling apart as of late and I know that a big part of that is niche sites like mine that address local team’s of interest more directly than ESPN can or has (At least on TV). So, I don’t get upset about rankings like these (despite evidence to the contrary) because they’re not done out of spite, but rather out of a lack of knowledge about what’s been going on here.

And what has been going on, quietly, is a general manager and head coach that has been building a contender. This may be the most balanced Vikings team I’ve ever seen, with depth and elite skill at nearly every position. Not only are they deep, they’re young and that makes them additionally dangerous. So, while I would love to see articles from the national media that lauds the team that I do love, I also understand that there is a hidden benefit to a lot of this negative press. It’s Bulletin board material. So, I welcome this lack of praise from the likes of ESPN or Sports Illustrated, because I know that Zimmer is going to use it to get the team riled up. And, mark my words, a riled up Vikings team has shown that it can be nearly unstoppable even when it wasn’t as deep as it is now. So, I really do believe that chances are that this Vikings team will be the first to play in a Super Bowl at it’s own stadium and when that happens I will bring this article back up to show that national media was way off, to the benefit of the team (and my site).

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