If there’s any caveat, any hollow consolation to explain away the worst defensive performance of the Mike Zimmer era and one of the worst in Minnesota Vikings’ history, it’s that Zimmer and Co. would never voluntarily field a defense with personnel this underwhelming.
Two games into the season, the Vikings were already missing three defensive staples: Danielle Hunter, Michael Pierce and Anthony Barr. That left them devoid of superstar talent and a couple of injuries away from a true disaster. Zimmer did a nice job devising a smart plan mid-season that seemed to mitigate explosive plays while emphasizing third down and red zone defense. But then Eric Kendricks and some key backups went down, leaving the Vikings exposed to a 52-point embarrassment against the New Orleans Saints.
Zimmer assured that there was no excuse to miss countless tackles and play as sloppily as the Vikings did on Christmas Day. But as his only form of self-defense, the coach offered a reminder as to what the team had lost, lest any fans forget.
“We’ve got to get Hunter back, we’ve got to get Pierce here, we’ve got to get Barr, Kendricks, Pro Bowl players, good players that we have, they need to be back,” Zimmer said, “and then we lost another corner again today (Cameron Dantzler). If you go back, and honest, I’m not trying to make excuses, it was embarrassing today. We’re missing four defensive linemen, we’re missing a safety, we’re missing three corners, we’re missing six linebackers, I believe, from where we started. We’re just a little undermanned. That’s still no excuse. These guys put on an NFL jersey, they’ve got to play.”
By addressing the elephant in the room as honestly as he did after Friday’s game, Zimmer is turning the page to 2021. His New Year’s Eve toast will certainly be “to good health,” in hopes that the general public will be able to return to U.S. Bank Stadium and spark one of the league’s best home-field advantages, and that the tens of millions of dollars of talent sitting on the team’s injured reserve can don a helmet.
After seeing the Saints run for 264 yards — the most allowed by a Vikings team in 15 years — there is no player more sorely missed than Pierce, who opted out of the season due to COVID-19 concerns. The last time Minnesota offered a lucrative contract to a nose tackle, Linval Joseph transformed the defense with his uncanny ability to plug holes in the running game while simultaneously pushing up the pocket. It may be naive to expect the same of Pierce out of the gate, but he possesses the same superhuman physical qualities as Joseph and has the stats to back it up.
The interior of the Vikings’ defensive line was as raw and ineffective as any in the league this year without him. All four of their primary players in the rotation played a career-high in snaps in 2020 — more by default than by merit. Jaleel Johnson and Shamar Stephen were merely average in their previous roles as sub-package players, so asking them to be 16-game starters has only accentuated their averageness. Armon Watts and Hercules Mata’afa are both young and searching for consistency, and rookie fourth-round pick James Lynch was disappointing.
Alvin Kamara scored six touchdowns against the Vikings on Friday, showing no hesitation to run into the teeth of the Minnesota tackles who were lucky to even get a hand on him.
Minnesota is suddenly 28th in rushing yards allowed this year after getting steamrolled by the Saints. Only three times this year have they held a team below 100 yards rushing. Compare that to the peak of their powers in 2017 when Joseph was the anchor of a team that held 11 opponents below 100 (including playoffs). Out of 70 defensive tackles with 50% of snaps, per Pro Football Focus, Johnson ranks 65th in run defense and Stephen 40th. They are 42nd and 48th, respectively, in run stops. Pierce, meanwhile, graded as a top 12 run-stopper in his two best seasons of 2017-18.
The pass rush has been just as big a problem, and while Pierce isn’t going to be a double-digit sack monster, he will eat up more blockers to clear the way for linebackers and ends. A breakdown of double-team win rate by ESPN’s Seth Walder showed that Johnson and Stephen were the bottom two defensive tackles in double team win rate (less than 4%) and were doubled less often than the league average — that wouldn’t happen with Pierce, a man who can squat over 700 pounds.
The entirety of the Vikings defensive tackle group has five sacks on the year, as many as 19 individuals across the league at that position. Stephen ties for 59th out of 70 with nine pressures on the season. Johnson is 67th with six. Pierce, conversely, has averaged 18 pressures per season as a nose tackle.
It’s easy to see how breakdowns on the front four have trickled down to the rest of the defense. How about a video game analogy? Like the old Atari game Asteroids, it’s easy to dispatch the space rocks when there are only a few of them floating across the screen, but once the game speeds up, a few asteroids are going to slip through the cracks. In football terms, so many leaks have sprung on the defensive line that it’s no longer realistic to expect Kendricks, Barr, or whoever is healthy at the moment to clean up every ball-carrier. That leaves the secondary exposed in a way it hasn’t been in previous years. There was no filter on the Vikings defensive line Friday. Everything got through. And every player looked bad as a result.
Getting Pierce back in 2021 will snuff out some of those opportunities at the point of attack. He’ll be expected to shake the rust off quickly from a dormant 2020 to be the impact player Joseph was half a decade prior, and in this grand vision of the future, fans also hope to see a healthy Hunter and a rugged 3-technique by his side.