Matthew Coller: For Vikings defensive tackles, stats don't tell the story

There aren't many flashy numbers to quantify the impact of Phillips, Bullard and Tillery on Vikings top-ranked defense.

Oct 20, 2024; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle Harrison Phillips (97) celebrates a tackle against the Detroit Lions during the first quarter at U.S. Bank Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matt Krohn-Imagn Images / Matt Krohn-Imagn Images

EAGAN — It isn’t hard to find hard data that proves the Minnesota Vikings defense has been elite this season. They have allowed the seventh fewest points per game, seventh in sacks and No. 1 in rushing yards allowed.

It also isn’t tough to unearth statistics that show the impact of certain players on the team’s overall rankings. Jonathan Greenard, for example, leads the NFL in quarterback pressures with 48. Andrew Van Ginkel has two pick-sixes and 5.0 sacks. Byron Murphy Jr. has three interceptions and seven pass breakups. Ivan Pace Jr. leads the team in tackles.

But there are other players whose value is much more difficult to pinpoint on paper. Specifically the Vikings three starting defensive linemen, Harrison Phillips, Jonathan Bullard and Jerry Tillery, do not have high pressure or sack totals and they aren’t likely to get Pro Bowl votes or get the highest grades by Pro Football Focus yet the bigger picture numbers of the defense can be traced to their efforts on the inside.

On Sunday against the Indianapolis Colts, the Vikings commanded the interior of the line of scrimmage, holding star running back Jonathan Taylor to just 48 yards on the ground, tied for his lowest output in a game this season.

“Harrison [Phillips] was fantastic and you felt him coming off the rock, eating up double teams,” head coach Kevin O’Connell said. “It's one thing to eat up blocks and allow our linebackers to run and safeties to run and make tackles, but resetting the line of scrimmage and — how many times do I pause the tape and see all of our interior D-linemen on their side of the line of scrimmage when the back has the ball in their hands.”

Pro Football Focus gave Phillips his highest grade of the year and the second highest grade of any defensive tackle with at least 30 snaps in Week 9.

Against the Colts, Phillips said that the Vikings switched things up on the interior, playing Indy in a much more traditional fashion than usual.

“We played a more common defense, something that a normal fan could watch and understand your assignment and role and that’s a switch up,” Phillips told Purple Insider. “The first few plays and first few drives of the game there’s a chance they were sitting on and waiting on some movement to happen and we didn’t do it.”

But Phillips said on Wednesday that it wasn’t the most positively graded game that he’s received from his coaching staff. The explanation for the difference between grades and how the coaches are seeing the Vikings’ defensive linemen actually says a lot about Brian Flores’s defense and the unglamorous jobs of the players on the inside.

Often times the defensive linemen in the Flores system aren’t being asked to line up and control the gap in front of them. The assignments regularly require a DT or DE to line up over one gap and then “travel” to another area after the snap. It can appear like the defensive tackle is getting pushed back by the offensive line but they are actually going in that direction as part of the play call.

“Sometimes you can get pushed off [the line of scrimmage] because you need to make it over three gaps,” Phillips said. “If you’re a shade on the defensive right and you have to make it to the other B gap, you might have to give a yard or two space to make that trip. If you do that, that opens up a seam that allows [Ivan Pace Jr.] to fire downhill. If you’re watching that from the end zone angle you’re like, ‘that nose guard got reached by three players, he’s four gaps out of the way.’ And we get into the film room the next day and our coach says, ‘plus, huge play HP, way to make the trip.’”

On many plays, the Vikings defensive linemen are blocker movers. Their job isn’t to end up in the backfield, it’s to open up space for somebody else to end up in the backfield.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to hunt through the Vikings All-22 coaches film for clips to show as an example of Phillips “making the trip” because it’s hard to know for sure what the assignments on given plays were on each play. However, the clip below from the Vikings win over the Texans shows Phillips lining up over the A gap and carrying his blocker all the way outside the hash. Jonathan Bullard [90] brings his man to the right as well and Andrew Van Ginkel flies in from the outside to make the tackle. Linebacker Blake Cashman [51] was coming down hill through a big hole as well and would have made a tackle for loss if Van Ginkel did not make the play.

“Sacks, pressures and hits are big but when you’re coached that you need to be looping out or running out to contain or setting up stunts for other players, you’re not going to get pressure,” Phillips said.

To be clear, PFF has graded Phillips well. He’s in the top 25 in overall grade. The system does not, however, grade Bullard or Tillery highly. That’s frustrating to Phillips.

“I had my high school buddies in this weekend who are all casual fans and they were talking about the Sunday Night Football player’s name and PFF rank says 80th then they assume [the player] sucks and that’s really far from the case,” Phillips said. “In our defense, I don’t think I could sit down with anyone who is with a program like that who could tell us what we’re doing in this defense.”

The difficulty with the grading system is that each player has his own context. Bullard rates as the third best tackler in the NFL and top 25 in run defense but he is downgraded because he isn’t registering pressures, sacks and hits. So in the areas where he’s supposed to shine, he’s standing out by the grades when looked at under a microscope.

“I’m here to stop the run and bring the physicality,” Bullard told Purple Insider. “That’s what they brought me here for, that’s what I hang my hat on. Making sure every game you see how physical I can be. Every week I try to go out and be the most physical person out there...Physicality, setting edges, not trying to play in the backfield. It’s not always pretty, it’s always crowded and you can’t always tell who does what with us three up front.”

Similarly, Tillery has graded above average as a tackler in every game except one and has added some jolt to the D-line with the most pressures among the Vikings D-linemen (11).

While they aren’t going to grade as well as pass rushing interior D-linemen, the value of interior defensive players who can either hold strong on the line of scrimmage or create gaps for linebackers and safeties may be higher than ever because of the way defenses are set up behind them. Teams are now being built on the back of smaller linebackers, which is the case with players like Ivan Pace Jr. and Josh Metellus, and they are playing two deep safeties more than ever.

“When you do that [play two high safeties], there's more pressure on the interior players to handle double teams, play with physicality, win the line of scrimmage,” defensive coordinator Brian Flores said. “I think it's always kind of been the foundational pieces of any strong defense. It's just kind of winning the line of scrimmage, handling the inside part of the field. I think we've got guys who are certainly doing that for us on a consistent basis.”

Another element of the interior D-line that can’t be quantified is communication. Flores said that he often talks with Bullard and Phillips about strategies and alignments that might work.

“I have a unique relationship with [Flores],” Bullard said. “Playing nine years now, he values my opinion. We do a lot of things and he asks us how we feel about it. One thing I like about this defense and I like about him is that he puts everyone in position to do what they are good at. If he asks me if I want to line up in a certain position and I’m like, ‘yeah I can but I’d prefer to do it like this because I can play it better that way,’ he listens. As long as you do it, he listens and rolls with it. If you mess it up and it doesn’t look good, he switches it, as he should. But he values our positions to be successful.”

“To have him ask us players what we want and how we see it, it means a lot to us. But that also shows what type of guys we have in this room.”

Phillips is the main communicator up front during the game. Watch close and you will see him motioning to the other D-linemen where they need to slide. He will often hand out assignments on a given play based on what he is seeing up front.

“I’ll tell them exactly what they need to do on that play and they can play super fast doing that,” Phillips said. “When Bull is able to be a 4i [lined up inside the offensive tackle] and knock back a tackle and not have to think about anything else, there’s not really many people better in the NFL at that than him. Tillery has some twitch. If you put him on an edge and tell him just to go or tell him to spike to a gap, then it’s easy for him and he flies around. I try to over communicate to put us in the best position.”

Phillips also works with the linebackers and safeties to give them insight into what he is seeing based on the opponent’s alignments and tendencies.

“I try to over communicate to put us in the best position,” Phillips said. “You know those linebackers and safeties have a lot on their plate.”

Flores’s defense relies on the group being bigger than any individual. By PFF’s metrics, they grade out as the 12th best defense overall, yet by the yardage-based statistic DVOA (which factors game situation and opponent) the Vikings have the best defense in the league. The difference is in all the things that can’t be captured on paper.

“We trust the plan, we trust each other,” Bullard said. “That’s what’s big about us three. We’re all a little different and doing different things but that’s how they built us here. We all did our jobs this week. We depend on each other.”

The Vikings D-linemen know the outside world can’t always see what they do. That’s OK with them.

“In this business you have to mute those things on social media and look for internal validations,” Phillips said. “That comes from things like Harrison Smith saying to me on the trainer’s table, ‘man, you were flying around out there, I saw you doing your job.’”

ADDITIONAL NOTES

— Blake Cashman was back at practice on a limited basis on Wednesday. O’Connell said:

“Hopefully pick up that workload as he goes. Blake's really confident and just absolutely dying to get back out there with the guys. Hopefully it's this week and we'll see how he handles the workload. I’ll keep you guys posted.”

Ivan Pace Jr. did not practice due to a knee issue.

— Trevor Lawrence was limited in Jaguars practice. It’s up in the air whether he will play on Sunday due to an “upper body” injury. Mac Jones is the Jags backup.