If the Vikings make the post-season, Zimmer should be Coach of the Year
Joe Johnson
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It’s funny.
While, outside of the WNBA (and those glorious Minnesota Twins seasons), we aren’t accustomed to winning stuff here in Minnesota… We are used to both having amazing talent here in Minnesota as well as losing that talent and regretting it forever.
Typically, seller’s remorse comes from players being traded (Randy Moss, Kevin Garnett, etc) or players in general. But, looking at the current race for NFL Coach of the Year, it’s also not hard to see how that can regret can extend to coaches as well.
Mike Tomlin, the head coach of the NFL’s sole undefeated team the Pittsburgh Steelers, has most votes for coach of the year as of the writing of this article. He’s been able to rejuvenate an aging Ben Roethlisberger, find a diamond in the rough in Chase Claypool, and with the news that his team may have a COVID outbreak on their hands, could end up coaching through a lot of uncertainty these next couple of weeks.
The 1B to Tomlin’s 1A would have to be the Cleveland Browns’, Kevin Stefanski. The Browns are 5-3 without their star running back Nick Chubb, or Odell Beckham Jr and they’re also THE BROWNS. However, the Browns are 1-2 in the past two weeks, and in those losses they only mustered 13 points TOTAL (and their other loss was a game in which they only mustered 6 points), so, Stefanski’s 1B might be fading to a distant second or third.
If you’re reading this article you’ll know what those two coaches have in common, as they both were once coordinators for the Vikings. After the Vikings started 0-2 / lost to the Atlanta Falcons, many pointed to Stefanski as the one that got away as everyone was essentially calling for Zimmer to be fired and for this team to have a monumental shift in philosophy from a team that seems stuck in the 20th century with their run-first mentality and investment/reliance on defense in a league that seems to be on the precipice of a fundamental shift as to how the game is played offensively.
Then the Vikings came out of the bye with back-to-back wins over the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions on the back of Dalvin Cook and a young scrappy defense held together by duct tape and late-round picks.
While it’s insane to say that a 3-5 team should have a coach in the running for Coach of the Year, it’s impossible to ignore what Zimmer and company have been able to do since the bye (and against playoff teams like the Seahawks and Titans, which bested these Vikings by one-point each). The Vikings’ defense is essentially the 49ers of… Defense, and the fact that not only have the Vikings beat (or almost beat) teams like the Packers, Lions and Seahawks, but they’ve also been able to do so by stymying some of the best quarterbacks in the NFL with the biggest group of ragtag corners in the entire NFL.
If Zimmer has/had one negative label coming into 2020, its that he hasn’t done much to evolve as a head coach. That he was both too stuck in the past and too stuck in his own way of doing things. Due to injury, though, this team has been forced to think outside the box on defense because they don’t have the personnel to play “straight up” the way that Zimmer typically would and in the process they’ve been able to shut down some of the best QBs and wide receivers in the process.
While it’s a bit frustrating to think about what this defense could’ve done in 2018/2019 had Zimmer applied some of this new flavor to those teams (case in point? Look at what Xavier Rhodes has done with the Colts now that he has some safety help via the zone they’re running)… But that’s not the point of this article. The point is that if these Vikings are able to claw their way out of the hole they put themselves in at the beginning of the season and make the playoffs, it won’t matter what happens in Pittsburgh, Cleveland or elsewhere because it’ll be safe to say that Zimmer SHOULD be the clear winner of the coach of the year award.