The truth and lies of pinning Vikings' past failures on Mike Zimmer
EAGAN — It’s a sports inevitability: When a coach gets fired, everything he did in the past was terrible and everything the new coach is doing is genius. The guy who just got hired has all the answers that the previous fool didn’t and everyone is much happier now.
So it should come as no surprise that players, most recently cornerback Kris Boyd, have gone on record with comments hinting that the Minnesota Vikings’ vibes are much improved post Mike Zimmer.
To paraphrase, Boyd said on Patrick Peterson’s All Things Covered podcast that the Zimmer coaching staff was uptight and players were afraid to make mistakes. This comes on the back of Adam Thielen saying the team is “rejuvenated” by Kevin O’Connell’s arrival. And it isn’t that far removed from Eric Kendricks referring to Mike Zimmer’s “fear-based” culture and Brian O’Neill talking about how nobody said hello in the hallways.
How much of the jabs at Zimmer cloaked in compliments for O’Connell are justified?
Certainly the answer isn’t none. Players were unhappy in 2021. Zimmer couldn’t hide his feelings about the starting quarterback — or almost anybody else, for that matter. By the end of training camp, Zimmer had publicly made his frustration known with unvaccinated players and the lack of depth on the roster put together by former GM Rick Spielman.
At the end of the season — after spending weeks arguing that his team was good — Zimmer finally snapped and slammed rookie Kellen Mond in a press conference after a loss to the Packers and snarked about Justin Jefferson chasing an all-time team record in Week 18.
During his tenure, Zimmer was hard on players when they were winning and over-the-top at times when they were losing. In 2016, several starting cornerbacks disobeyed his orders in a late-season game against the Packers. The following season the Vikings went to the NFC Championship while their head coach was openly questioning whether his quarterback was good or lucky.
Wait, what was that last sentence? “Went to the NFC Championship?” Hm.
Is it reasonable to agree that change was needed and that the previous work environment had grown toxic but let’s make sure we don’t forget some important things about Zimmer in the process. Things like top-11 defenses in points allowed from 2014-2019. Things like his winning percentage ranking higher than Marv Levy, Mike Ditka, Jimmy Johnson and Mike Shanahan. The fact that his much-maligned defense still finished second in the NFL in sacks. The oft-overlooked point that Kirk Cousins prior to Zimmer had a 93.7 quarterback rating (97.5 if you only count his full-time starting years) and with Zimmer he scored a 103.5 rating. Only five QBs are better in QB rating from ‘18-’21, yet he ruined the quarterback?
That’s not to say that the not-so-subtle slaps at Zimmer’s culture were wrong. He could have shown more public and private belief in Cousins. But he picked the dead-on correct offensive system for Cousins and got career years out of the quarterback, partly by hiring offensive coordinators like Kevin Stefanski and Gary Kubiak, whose M.O. is to maximize QB efficiency. By the way, from 2017-2021, the Vikings ranked 10th in scoring. You know who’s ninth? The Green Bay Packers.
The bar to clear for O’Connell to be better than Zimmer is not low. This isn’t the New York Giants or Jacksonville Jaguars where their tyrannical head coach was also way in over his head from an X’s and O’s standpoint. It would be almost impossible for Brian Daboll and Doug Pederson to do worse than their predecessors. That’s not the case with O’Connell.
You might say that the pressure is on O’Connell to outdo Zimmer’s 2021 to prove that his everybody’s-voice-matters mantra is better than Zimmer’s less friendly philosophy of handling players but the heat really should be on the players to make O’Connell right and Zimmer wrong.
It’s a crazy thing in the NFL how the narratives change about a coach when the roster turns over. Bill Belichick is probably still amazing at his job but not quite as amazing without that Brady guy. Vince Lombardi only went 7-5-2 when he left Bart Starr to join Washington. Is anybody talking about Pete Carroll’s brilliant defense? Might that have some connection to losing their elite defensive line, Kam Chancellor and Richard Sherman?
Could O’Connell come up with a smarter offensive game plan that made the Vikings more productive? Yes. Could his culture result in players being more confident? Sure (Kickers, rejoice!). Could Ed Donatell’s modern scheme baffle opposing QBs? Why not?
But none of those things will matter a lick unless the players as a whole perform better than they did the last two seasons, especially when it matters most. Zimmer didn’t get beaten by Amari Cooper in the back of the end zone against the Cowboys or no-show on offense against the Browns or get pushed around in the trenches and give up more than 100 yards on the ground in 13 of 17 games. It’s a tough sell to say those things would have been drastically different if he’d been more friendly.
The heat is also on ownership and the front office to make Zimmer wrong. Since the Vikings didn’t do things drastically different with the bones of the roster, they are making a big bet that the grump caused the majority of the problems and that a new culture will solve them. If not, it will be an even tougher sell to say they did the right thing as an organization by believing it was the mean man’s fault and sticking with many of the same players who have been hinting that all they needed was a culture change.
And if it turns out that Zimmer’s X’s and O’s were more important than being a walking smiley face emoji and the Vikings miss the postseason again, the Vikings will have set themselves back on a bad bet that the players, who met with ownership before the hiring of O’Connell, were right to point the finger.
