The good feelings and praise showered on Mike Zimmer – along with a bucket of Gatorade – after his first career win Sunday didn’t keep him occupied for long.
There was a question postgame about the culprit, but Zimmer had gotten an answer by the time he took the podium Wednesday afternoon.
“That’s over and done with, too,” he said. “We’ve moved on.”
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In fact, the moving on – whether it was channeling Encyclopedia Brown to figure out who doused him, or simply enjoying his undefeated record as a head coach – seemed to come pretty quickly.
“Oh, it means I won one game,” Zimmer repsonded when asked what the victory over the Rams meant to him. “Honestly I haven’t looked at it at all as far as anything monumental or anything like that. This season is such a marathon anyway … Honestly by the time I hit the locker room I was already thinking about New England, after I dried off.”
There was probably plenty of thinking about New England to do, for Zimmer and his coaching staff.
New England is 0-1 after a 33-20 opening-week road loss to the Miami Dolphins, but they still have Tom Brady at quarterback and Bill Belichek as head coach.
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New England is often cited as the cream of the crop for the past decade in the NFL (for good reason), and Zimmer said Brady and behemoth tight end Rob Gronkowski looked good last week, despite the Patriots’ loss. The head coach was asked if he’d try to do things differently to “outsmart” the Pats.
“Well I’m really not that smart anyway so I just kind of, we focus on our guys and what we think is the best thing to do each week,” he said. “Obviously it’s a great challenge against not only those two guys but they’ve got a lot of other good players too. We’re, so far, in the infancy stages of what we’re trying to do in this program that we want to go out and perform well each and every week.”
In charge of that stifling Miami defense – which held Brady and the Pats’ offense to 315 yards – is Kevin Coyle, who served as the defensive backs coach in Cincinnati from 2003-2011. He worked under Zimmer from 2008 until the end of his tenure there.
If Miami's win means anything: blitzing Tom Brady may be an unnecessary risk for #Vikings, Mike Zimmer http://t.co/XOpKKLMz61
— Andrew Krammer (@Andrew_Krammer) September 10, 2014
Does that bode well for the Vikings, since the Dolphins had defensive success and they may run a similar scheme to the Vikings?
“Every week is so different in this league,” Zimmer said. “Nothing is the same as you’ll see this week or the next week after that. Everything is so different. I suppose it would help them, they’ve been practicing against similar things the same. We just have to go out and play good.”
Read a transcript of Mike Zimmer’s press conference here.
