Matthew Coller: Justin Jefferson signed up for this moment

Jefferson has dominated the Lions but hasn't always come home with wins. Now the Vikings need one of those big games most...

Sep 29, 2024; Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA; Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Justin Jefferson (18) gestures to fans while leaving the field following the game against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images / Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images

EAGAN — Inside the empty practice facility at TCO Performance Center, Justin Jefferson stands in front of a handful of media members in sweatpants, a hoodie and his fuzzy slippers. By Year 5 of these weekly press conferences with Jefferson, we have reached the point where each side knows what’s coming. He will address how he expects the opponents to guard him and the magnitude of the game. He might be asked to comment on some record that he’s approaching or some event that he attended (two weeks ago he was pumped for the Lynx playoff run) and eventually we run out of questions and he goes back to his business.

Every so often he might casually drop some trash talk, but he says it so playfully and casually that nobody can turn it into bulletin board material. Also, what exactly are you going to do with that material when he’s always the best player on the field. When he said that he was going to do the Griddy in Lambeau, everybody shrugged because they figured he probably would. And then he did.

But this week Jefferson had something a little different to talk about than previous years: His 5-0 team heading into the biggest game of their season to date.

During his previous four seasons, his teams have never been in this position before. In his rookie year, the Vikings started 1-4. In Year 2, they were 2-3 at this point. They were 4-1 in 2022 but reeled off three tightrope wins against mediocre teams and were still questioned as a real contender. Last year, they went 1-4 again. This time around, the Vikings lead the NFL in point differential. And while the last two games have technically been won in close fashion, that’s only because of late charges by teams that were getting blasted.

Advancing to 6-0 with a win over Detroit would send up a flare that the Vikings are the team to beat in the NFC and possibly the entire league. It would put them in a position that they haven’t been as a franchise since 2009.

This is the moment Jefferson has been waiting for. This is the vision that he bought into when signing the extension. He’s put up huge numbers and Griddy’d many times inside US Bank Stadium, yet he’s rarely been favored at home against an opponent that’s considered a Super Bowl favorite. This week, the Vikings are 1.5 point favorites against the NFL’s leader in points per game.

“It's a divisional game and I know the importance behind it,” Jefferson said.

Jefferson has certainly made the most of his games against Detroit. In fact, he has left a trail of sad cornerbacks looking around for answers, game after game. Jefferson averages 134 yards per game versus Detroit in his career, which works out to 2,278 yards over 17 games.

When he was asked whether he enjoys playing against the Lions, he laughed for about 10 seconds before giving a non-disrespectful answer. But he knows.

But somehow those games against the Lions haven’t resulted in wins at the rate you would expect. His 18 catches for 333 yards and two touchdowns were in vein last year as the Vikings lost both games versus Dan Campbell’s feisty club. In 2022 the Vikings won the first game versus Detroit and then Jefferson went totally bonkers in a huge Week 13 matchup as the Vikings were trying to win the conference. He racked up 223 yards and it could have been more if he hadn’t been improperly called out of bounds. They lost 34-23.

“Even the way I've been playing and sadly still getting a loss, that's the tough thing about it,” Jefferson said. “So, you know, just trying to make the most of my opportunities, just trying to, you know, be the best that I can be for this team. I just definitely got to come up with a [win] this time.”

The 5-0 start to this season has been even better than the best-case scenario that the Vikings could have imagined to begin the season. A win against the Lions could potentially propel them to go farther than they have gone before with Jefferson as the superstar.

“I always love these type of games, the games that you need the most that are important… whenever those games are in front of me, I like to make the most of those,” Jefferson said.

While the star receiver has never made waves like some of his colleagues through the ups and downs, there is a different shade to his demeanor in 2024. As a young player with a veteran QB when he arrived in the league, he could do his job and let Cousins take care of the rest. Now Jefferson is a veteran player that everyone is looking toward as the centerpiece of the team. Head coach Kevin O’Connell has urged him over the last two years, including after he signed his extension, to take the reins and lead the franchise where he wants it to go.

“You recognize it definitely in that receiver room,” O’Connell said of Jefferson’s leadership. “I can think back to when Speedy [Jalen Nailor] was scoring a touchdown early on in the season. Everybody saw [Jefferson] celebrating and he was the most excited on the whole team… Then to that very same point the following week, you see him put his arm around Jordan [Addison] as he works through the ankle and he gets it. He understands his role. He's experienced a lot in this league, especially coming off last year…I think he just gets everything about what it means to lead in that room and now he's doing it even more throughout our football team.”

Making the most of this weekend’s game and coming away with a win would be a little sweeter for Jefferson because of the way the offseason played out. Rather than battle through the media or fight the team on a contract extension deep into training camp, he signed before minicamp and got right to work with Sam Darnold. Talk hosts and analysts wondered if he was going to be happy without his veteran quarterback or if he would be soon demanding a trade because the Vikings were only expected to win six or seven games.

Those inquiring about that might not have noticed that he put up 476 yards in the final four games of the season without Cousins in 2023. Or they might have missed the other parts of the roster that were enhanced due to having a manageable QB contract on the salary cap.

But it was certainly bound to be an adjustment without the QB he played with for the first four seasons of his career. During training camp, Jefferson repeatedly urged Darnold to trust him. There were good days and bumpy ones during the summer but by the end they seemed to be on the same page. In Week 2, that came to fruition as the veteran quarterback saw the results of that trust when he found Jefferson for a 97-yard touchdown en route to beating the San Francisco 49ers.

Darnold’s presence has given us a new thing to toss at Jefferson in his weekly press conferences. What’s the chemistry like? What do you think of his arm? And Jefferson is talking about Darnold the way he used to talk about Kirk. That’s his guy now.

Jefferson was asked in this week’s session what has surprised him about Darnold during the Vikings’ hot start to the season.

“Nothing, honestly, nothing has surprised me,” Jefferson said. “Just the way he come to work every single day. His preparation and his ability to lead is something that we see every single day and something that we've seen in training camp before the season even started. That's something that's becoming new to everybody else, but not new to us. So it's something that we're still working towards. He's still trying to figure out the potential of this and how the potential of how he can play. We're still figuring out things, but the ceiling is definitely high for him.”

We’re all still trying to figure out the ceiling of this thing, too. The 5-0 Vikings, driven by Jefferson, can make a case that the sky is the limit with a victory against the Lions. That’s exactly what Jefferson has been aiming for since he arrived.