On Mediocrity and Rick Spielman, Next Man Up On The Vikings Hot Seat
After witnessing the primetime debacle that was last Sunday’s Vikings-Cowboys game, I think it’s time we all took a long, hard look in the mirror and admit it: we are rooting for a mediocre team.
Why this should be anything of a surprise to any of us is puzzling only to ourselves; any outsider could quickly size up our team (.500-ish) and we fans (hopelessly over-optimistic, with an entitlement complex). Nobody wants to admit that they (or the team they obsess over) is mediocre. We’ve fallen into a pitfall. When you’re hovering among the average, you’re only a step or two away from being above average and you come to believe that’s close enough—like a child betting a pat on the head and a participation trophy without excelling one bit—so, above average it is!
For a football team, a couple of lucky bounces is all it takes for a .500 team to be above average—or at least appear to be. It’s natural for any passionate fan to take that one step farther, to assume that his/her beloved team is already above average, and their average-ish showing is simply due to some un-lucky bounces. Or the referees. Or a single blown coverage. Or a kick that veered left (or right). We Viking fans have been giving our team a series of emotional participation trophies, wanting to believe that we have a playoff-caliber team on our hands. But in truth, we’re 3-4 for a reason, and we’re now just a couple of unlucky bounces away from being a truly bad team.
Entering the season, there were a million reasons why we as Vikings fans could explain away a 7-9 season in 2020–.500-ish to be sure—and have complete and utter faith that the team—despite minimal changes in the offseason– deserved to be thought of as a legitimate Super Bowl contender coming into 2021. And as such, we felt justified to feel complete outrage when our 3-3 team somehow found a way to lose last Sunday to the visiting 5-1 Cowboys. We were legitimately dumbfounded, not when our average-ish team looked very above average for three quarters, dominating play even, but when they looked decidedly below-average at the end, virtually choosing to give the game away by playing uninspired offense, refusing to capitalize on three gifts from the referees, and then rolling over on defense as the game slipped out of our hands. We are convinced that they are more talented than that, and we expect more—completely ignoring the Secret to Happiness, which is High Hopes and Low Expectations. We expect the moon and the stars–because they at times appear capable of delivering the moon and the stars.
This is what average teams do. Just as the good teams are prone to occasionally look like an average team when the conditions and the football gods converge to deem it so, the average teams will occasionally look decidedly un-average. Sometimes they can look like an honest-to-god Good Team. Sometimes they can look like a Terrible Team. And, much of the time, they look like what they are—a team that’s sitting somewhere in the middle. This is where our 3-4 Vikings sit now, and it’s where they sat last year, too. We need to face these facts.
And, so does Rick Spielman, and/or the Wilfs.
A team that is as thin as an overinflated balloon–with an annual salary cap dance far more dismal than your junior prom, thanks to a cringing dedication to protecting an expensive defensive core and an even more expensive quarterback–has precious little room for error going into the season, or in-season. The Vikings’ mediocre secondary was one step from dismal two weeks ago, and then Patrick Peterson went down. Their strong defensive line was one step from mediocre last week, and then Danielle Hunter went down—and out for the year. Their disastrous offensive line had been one step below mediocrity, when they finally—thankfully– handed a starting job to Christian Darrisaw, and there they remain—mediocre at best.
Vikings GM Spielman, who did a masterful job constructing a 2017 Vikings roster that went 13-3, winning more games than all but one other squad (the 15-1 ’98 edition) in Vikings history, and then proceeded to spend four years reversing the mojo, has been conveniently behind the scenes during the wild ups and downs of this 2021 season. He has somehow escaped blame, while his coach, Mike Zimmer, has been a popular (and justifiable) punching bag. His handiwork has left the Vikings in the state of mediocrity that we find ourselves in now. His decisions have created the uneven starting squads, lack of depth and lack of options that have been a hallmark of recent seasons.
That ’17 squad felt one signing away from a Super Bowl and I do not fault him one bit for overpaying to bring in clearly the best free agent quarterback out there in Kirk Cousins. I do, however fault him for: overspending in a desperate attempt to preserve past glory on the defensive side of the ball; for further overspending on the subsequent Cousins extension; for ignoring the offensive line’s blatant mediocrity for several draft seasons; for treating the kicking game like a complete afterthought as though onetime standouts-turned-headaches Chris Kluwe and Blair Walsh had robbed him of any interest in that phase of the game, and for developing an obsession with collecting mid-to-late round draft picks that conveniently and cheaply end up on the bench, versus getting aggressive and moving in the other (positive) direction at draft time.
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It’s this lack of aggressiveness, this be-content-with-slogging-through-in-hopes-that-something-good-will-happen-later approach that unifies Spielman and Zimmer atop the Vikings braintrust. Adam Thielen’s savvy observations after last Sunday’s embarrassing lost could apply to the front office just as well as the on-field product: “We gotta quit just hanging in games. Every game we just hang around, hang around, let the (other) team hang around instead of putting our foot on the gas and going,” That applies to both Zimmer and Spielman, too. What’s perhaps most frustrating is that both of these leaders were once much more aggressive in their approaches to their jobs. Their earlier work was much more rooted in aggressively building towards a greater goal, but in recent seasons, it’s all about hanging around, hanging around.
The Vikings toy with our collective minds enough as it is, so this .500-ish existence of ours needs to end. To get there, one of two things need to happen come season’s end. 1) Spielman will need to start looking in the mirror and asking himself how to get back to his pre-2017 self and build something—getting off of this .500-ish treadmill–even if that means taking a few steps back before high-stepping over mediocrity and into Good Team territory once again. Or, 2) the Wilfs need to find somebody else who will.
