Following their loss to the Detroit Lions, the Minnesota Vikings have engaged in a game of “Who’s Fault Is It, Anyway?” in regards to their 32nd ranked defense.
Early in the week, Kevin O’Connell promised that the coaching staff would be honest with themselves and pointed to a need to turn over every stone schematically. He suggested that they need to mix up coverages more and look closely at personnel.
On Wednesday, defensive coordinator Ed Donatell faced a similar line of questioning about why the bend-don’t-break defense has done both far too often, giving up 400-plus yards in five straight weeks. He acknowledged that allowing that type of production from opposing offenses will, “never be the standard of the organization,” but also didn’t go very far when it came to what they can do differently.
“I don’t think it’s ever drastic, I really don’t think it’s drastic,” Donatell said. “You set your plan, you know, in April or May, of what kind of team you want to be. But you’ve also gotta know through injuries or maybe changes in the league, you have to make adjustments along the way.”
Health certainly isn’t an excuse. The Vikings had 10 of the 11 starters they began the season with on Sunday against the Lions.
If there have been changes in the league, they haven’t made adjustments to those along the way as the defense has progressively become more porous as the season has gone along.
That wasn’t where the conversation with the Twin Cities media ended for the Vikings’ DC.
He was quizzed about blitzing more, which O’Connell has mentioned on a number of occasions (and the numbers showed an uptick last week).
“We like our four-man rush, and they have been so close so many times,” Donatell said. “We get a lot of hurries from this group. But it’s just that extra little thing if you can hold the coverage just a little bit longer, a lot of those rushes will work with four. But then we’ve added some five, you’ve seen some changeup the last few weeks and so forth, and we’ll continue to have a combination of both.”
Per Pro-Football Reference, the Vikings are 24th in blitz percentage, 24th in pressure percentage and 25th in QB Knockdown percentage.
What about the coverage and the concerning stats cited by ESPN when it comes to playing “off” coverage? Is that execution or scheme?
“I think it’s really more execution, you know what I mean?” Donatell said. “Just get tighter and so forth. We have a good mixture of schemes.”
You can certainly buy that players aren’t executing the Vic Fangio-inspired scheme but over Cam Dantzler’s first two seasons the QB ratings on throws in his direction were 94.0 and 70.3. This year it’s 125.7. Chandon Sullivan’s last three seasons in a similar system were all under 92 and this year his rating allowed is 108.4.
Back in training camp, the general philosophy of the defense was presented as being difficult for quarterbacks to diagnose post-snap. If they are having problems with that, it hasn’t shown as opposing QBs have a 67.4% completion and 8.0 yards per attempt (32nd).
“We want to make it harder,” Donatell said. “It’s not hard enough. As long as you’re working at it, taking a hard look at yourself, you’ll get there.”
They have to get there in order to have a chance in the postseason an this week’s reaction from O’Connell made it obvious that he’s aware of that.
Donatell’s responses left plenty of uncertainty as it pertains to why they have struggled so much and how they are going to fix it. Not that we can expect them to lay out the plan on the white board but if the first step is admitting/diagnosing the problem, that was difficult to find within his words.
The get-right game against the Colts, who are 31st in scoring, is there for the taking on Saturday but we have seen what tension surrounding one side of the ball can do to a team.
In 2016, Norv Turner quit after back-to-back 10-point showings against the Eagles and Bears and the Vikings dropped four of their next five games. In 2018, Mike Zimmer fired John DeFilippo and the offense seemed to get an instant jolt with back-to-back wins but ultimately got shut down by the Bears in Week 17 to the tune of 164 yards and missed the playoffs.
You might say that O’Connell is not Zimmer and his handling of the locker room this year has been proof of that. It would be hard to argue otherwise. However, he’s in a similar position as the former ball coach where he has to decide how far he wants to go in making changes in a season that has been special up until this point.
We have often heard, “years like this don’t come along too often.” Translated: We better turn this golden opportunity into a deep playoff run. Maybe translated further: We should do everything under the sun to make it happen, no matter how it looks or whose feelings are hurt.
What we’re seeing is the first major challenge of O’Connell’s career as a head coach. Everybody is ready to collaborate and sing around the campfire until the defense gives up 400 yards for the fifth time in a row. Now what’s the plan?
Can we find any answers in the data?
One direction they could go is playing more man coverage. Last summer PFF made an interesting discovery regarding man vs. zone: They found that a team’s talent level shines through more with man than zone coverages. PFF wrote:
“A fundamental difference between man and zone….Man lets the talent play out. Great coverage will almost always defeat weak receiving, and great receiving will almost always defeat weak coverage. And it’s not just that this relationship exists in theory, but we know quarterbacks are very likely to throw the ball to specific players on account of the talent disparity, which is why the EPA outcomes correspond accordingly. Zone is a far cloudier picture, as the coverage ability is noisy and the targets don’t correspond to the talent levels.”
By PFF’s metrics, the Vikings have the sixth highest graded defense, yet they have struggled mightily. That could simply be based on several players having good seasons or it could be connected to the zone scheme being more noisy.
At last update by PFF, they were playing the second lowest percentage of man coverage.
After their loss to the Cowboys, PFF’s Haley English opined: “After their collapse against the Dallas Cowboys (allowing 0.7 EPA per play in zone), it might be time to wonder if they’ll try running some more man coverage to see if that works.”
The man vs. zone report also found that man coverage is more volatile from week to week but the Vikings need to catch the right side of variance in order to win in the postseason, as they often have in close moments this year.
As far as blitzing goes, it’s hard to match up teams that have success defensively and those who send extra heat because bad defenses might be doing it out of desperation. Blitz percentages don’t exactly correlate with pressure. Per Pro-Football Reference, four of the top five pressure teams also blitz under 30% of the time. The Giants, who lead the NFL in blitz percentage, rank fifth in hurries but they are only 18th in defensive Expected Points Added.
It might be about picking spots and players. Linebacker Jordan Hicks has only rushed 7.4% of the time, which is 65th of 70 qualifying linebackers (per PFF), yet he has a pass rush win percentage in the top 25 and 11th best pass rush production rate.
Harrison Smith could be used as a rusher more often. Last year he rushed 43 times and created eight pressures had three sacks. This year he’s blitzed only eight times. He’s also only lined up in the box on 337 plays in 2021 and only 167 this season. Moving around to cause havoc for opposing QBs has been a staple of Smith’s career that appears to be underutilized.
The number of things the Vikings could try defensively expands well beyond these bounds to handling certain situations differently to tweaking their rules regarding how they cover certain route combinations, motions, formations etc.
While they are have a difficult task in deciding what alterations need to be made, everything should be on the table. After Donatell’s press conference, it’s not clear whether that’s the case.
Related: How will the Vikings solve what ails their defense?
Related: Ed Donatell: ‘There’s no question that we’ll come out of this’
