How big is the Buccaneers game Sunday for the Vikings? Cousins? Zimmer?
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I really try to avoid hyperbole (for effect or in general) when I write/record my Vikings coverage. That gets difficult at times, because while the 2020 Minnesota Vikings have a mediocre record, they’re anything but.
In games like against the Seahawks, or the second Packers game, this team has looked great. The offense is one of the best in the league, and the defense seems to be improving each week (especially if you ask Pro Football Focus).
However, this team makes a tremendous amount of mistakes that take requires the offense to play near perfect in the second-half. So, despite their mediocre record they’re actually a weird mix of elite units and awful mistakes/turn over differential.
Enter the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The first “good” team the Vikes have faced in a month. I put “good” in (air) quotes because they’ve lost two in a row and three of their last four and are in desperate need for a win to right their ship.
The Vikings on the other hand, have won five of their last six and control their destiny going into the final quarter of the season. If the Vikings win three of those final four, they’re essentially a shoe-in for the 7th-seed (with around a 89% chance to get in).
That makes this game most likely the most impactful and entertaining games not only this weekend, but this season. But is it as big as people making it out to be?
For example, Drew Mahowald (who some of you may remember worked here a couple years ago) wrote recently that Sunday’s game will be “career defining for [Vikings head coach] Mike Zimmer”.
I’ve also seen articles saying that the Bucs game will decide the futures of Zimmer and Vikings QB Kirk Cousins. Or that if the Vikings lose they might foreclose on US Bank Stadium and sell it to a paint ball league.
Okay, the last one was obviously (I hope?) a joke. But, all of these headlines got me to wondering just how important Sunday’s game was.
As stated above, Minnesota has nearly a 90% chance to win Sunday’s match-up. One that some “experts” are only giving the Vikings an 11% chance to best Tampa Sunday. That seems egregious, as the Vikings are heading to Tampa as 6.5 points underdogs according to the most popular regulated sites we found at Sports Betting Dime.
First, it may surprise you that I actually AGREE with Drew. This game is big, and while this team and it’s defense will (yet again) be without linebacker Eric Kendricks, they kinda NEED to come through. I don’t mean they need to for playoff positioning, but rather because Zimmer has a growing reputation for blowing it in big spots.
Remember the Week 17 game against the Chicago Bears in 2018? Where they rested starters and the Vikings needed the win to make the post-season (to play the Bears, again, at full strength)?
Yeah. Me too.
How about the three playoff games they’ve lost under Zimmer?). First up? An incredibly memorable yet boring Wild Card game against the Seattle Seahawks. That Seahawks team was being called one of the best Wild Card teams ever, and while Zimmer (and the temperature) held the Seahawks to 3 points for most the game, the offense only mustered three field goals and ended up losing 10-9 after…. Something happened? I can’t remember, but I think it involved people telling me to kill myself because I said Blair Walsh should be cut (I do NOT miss Reddit).
2017 was a fun year. Magical, even. One of those lightening-in-a-bottle seasons that got everyone in Vikingsland believing that we might, just might, finally get over the Super Bowl hump. We went into Philly thinking that the Super Bowl appearance was ours and that their back-up QB Nick Foles had NO CHANCE against the historically stifling third-down D Zimmer had constructed.
I’ll never forget one of the many, many wide open 20+ yard throws that Foles had against the Vikings D. All Pro Vikings safety came over to the blown coverage and pushed the Eagles receiver out of bounds, then threw his hands up while shrugging his shoulders to essentially show that THAT defense with all it’s talent and continuity had zero idea what was going on.
Later Zimmer would admit that he over-schemed. That he tried to add too many new wrinkles to an already complex system, which made it so his defenders were too busy thinking to just play.
The 49ers game last season was equally embarrassing. It felt like the torch wasn’t just being passed from the Vikings to the Niners, but rather it was being violently taken by the Niners’ front seven. That game was so bad that Zimmer’s long time first in command, George Edwards, was forced to fall on the sword and was fired almost immediately after the game.
There are other regular season examples of this. Some, like VikingsTerritory’s own Bob Sansevere, that say the Vikings don’t know how to handle success. I’ve said that I agree with him, but I don’t think it’s solely that.
I think they also, hot take alert, fold in big spots. While that sounds like the same thing Sansevere said, it’s more nuanced than that. Sure, they have to be somewhat successful for a game to be a “big spot”. Not handling success, in my estimation, means blowing any game (a la the Buffalo game from 2018).
Not coming through in a “big spot” means you’re successful and also playing against another successful team in a game with major consequences. Outside of two wins over the Saints, Zimmer’s teams consistently do not do that.
While he was absolutely SLAMMED for the take at the time, Mike Florio (who is a Vikings fan) said the following after the Vikings extended Zimmer this past off-season:
““It feels like this team is always going to be good enough to be in the mix, but never good enough to be in the hunt.” And: “Maybe it’s good enough for the Vikings to strive to win the Super Bowl (and) hope they win a Super Bowl. But instead of blowing it up and starting over again and trying to build a team that within five years that may win a Super Bowl, let’s just keep treading water because it’s going to be good for business to tread water with a team that’s on the fringes of contention.”
I clearly defended Florio in the above article, saying that it was hard to disagree with what Florio was saying (outside of the whole “Wilf’s extended him because they care more about ticket sales than contending”, as that was pure speculation than the other fact/record based analysis).
I’ve said, recently, that if these Vikings make the post-season after starting 1-5 in 2020, Zimmer deserves to be the NFL Coach of the Year. While that sounds like I’m backtracking on my “Zimmer on the hot seat?” Takes from before the bye, if you really think about what I actually said it is the exact opposite of that. It was more me reporting on the state of the team at the time and applying it across the entire season.
While it’d be nonsense to say that Zimmer’s job would be on the line if they get blown out by the Bucs tomorrow, it would reinforce a lot of the negative narratives that have formed around this team this season (and applying that across the Zimmer regime, Zimmer’s reputation).
That they’re barely beating bad teams. Which sounds a lot like the negative narratives that have surrounded Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins both before he came to Minny, but especially since. People that made up their mind about Cousins in 2018 love to post his W-L record against teams with a record > .500 .
Because that tells us all we need to know! Not who his teammates were, who the team was, who the opponent was, how good their defense was, where they played, who the coaches were, etc.
While it may seem like I’m taking Zimmer to task for something that I’m defending Cousins against, that’s not how football works. Head coaches are much more directly responsible for a team’s win-loss record than a quarterback. That’s why George Edwards was fired and Kirk Cousins was extended after that Niners victory.
The articles, then, saying that tomorrow’s game will dictate Cousins’ future in Minny? Yeah, sorry, not buying it on any level. If they lose or win, Cousins will still be the Vikings QB until 2022 (and perhaps longer). Also, that’s how it SHOULD be.
Cousins gives this Vikings team the best, most consistent chance to win now and in the future of any purple QB since 2004 (as Favre wasn’t meant to be the long-term answer). This Vikings offense is elite for a reason, and considering that we’ve yet to really draft and develop a long-term answer at quarterback also since 2004….
Yeah, Spielman isn’t letting Cousins go anywhere.
Let’s hope, though, that this is all for naught. The Vikings have a very good chance to beat the Tom Brady Buccaneers. Should they? I’d say so if Kendricks was playing, but this game really is going to come down to the same question for each team.
Which team is going to show up?
Both the Vikings and the Buccaneers can look like legitimate contenders or complete garbage. While the latter should negate the former, I feel that the Vikings have shown that if they can limit the mistakes they’ve been making they can hang with anyone.
But if they make the kind of mistakes Sunday that they’ve been making since the bye they won’t stand a chance. That will fall on Zimmer, not Cousins and it will most likely mean that their playoff hopes are dashed (which makes it by default pretty damn important).