Explosive passes must top the list of post-bye Vikings goals
Against the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, Kirk Cousins threw one pass that traveled more than 20 yards in the air. This season only 6.1% of his passes have gone deep downfield, which is the second lowest in the NFL next to Matt Ryan. As a result, Cousins has the league’s second lowest overall average depth of target.
What’s interesting is how far these numbers deviate from Cousins’ past. His downfield passing rates have been consistent in recent years, with 12.7% of throws traveling 20-plus yards in 2021, 12.6% in 2020 and 13.7% in 2019. Even in 2018 when John DeFilippo implemented a quick passing offense he was over 10%. By PFF’s grading system, he has been among the elites when taking deep shots, ranking fourth in 2021 only behind Kyler Murray, Josh Allen and Tom Brady.
Head coach Kevin O’Connell said that the shortage of deep success is something he wants to study during the bye week.
“I’m going to take a long look at that and see what that translates to,” he said on Monday.
O’Connell pointed out that there have been underneath throws that have turned into explosive plays but Cousins has only 14 passes that have gained more than 20 yards (regardless of distance on the actual throw), which ranks 21st among all QBs. One of those plays was on a Justin Jefferson throw to Dalvin Cook. Ten of the other 13 went to Jefferson, leaving only three 20+ plays to all other receivers.
It’s plausible that defenses are playing to keep Justin Jefferson in front of them, causing Cousins to either look to other receivers or forcing O’Connell to dial up short and intermediate passes to his superstar receiver.
“If [opponents] do want to play things deep to short, [Kirk] making great decisions and being really accurate with the ball underneath is a whole another layer to his game to where that accuracy tends to translate to guys getting opportunities,” O’Connell said. “But we want to be efficient and explosive.”
Miami strayed from the two-deep look against the Vikings. Safety Brandon Jones (per PFF) was lined up in the box for 29 plays on Sunday and in the slot for five more. He was only in a deep role on 11 plays. But the Dolphins attacked Cousins, pressuring him on 42% of plays, the most since Week 1.
The pressure and penetration up front took away from one of the ways in which Cousins has hit on deep throws in recent years: play-action. He gained 9.0 yards per pass attempt when employing a play fake in 2021 and 9.6 YPA in 2020. This year that number has sunk to 6.9 yards per play-action attempt and versus the Dolphins it was under five yards per throw.
“I think I can continue to try to help find ways to do that for our guys and put Kirk in premier situations to where he can pitch and catch to our skill guys,” O’Connell said. “Definitely something I’ll look at this week.”
O’Connell has been successful at dialing up wide open looks in the intermediate area (10-19 yards from the line of scrimmage). Cousins is averaging more than 10 yards per attempt despite having just two “big-time” throws and five turnover-worthy plays. But those throws make up only 21% of plays, whereas 62% are coming on throws under 10 yards. And Cousins is gaining just 5.6 yards per attempt on the short stuff.
On Monday, O’Connell explained his internal dialogue when it comes to dialing up risky plays versus being risk-averse.
“It’s been an evolving thing for me…‘Do I want to expose us to potential negative plays?’ Sometimes the answer is yes because of the reward, whether it’s the score of the game, the situation of the game. ‘Do we need to go get the lead back?’ versus ‘We have the lead,’ and although we don’t want to overdo the field position game, I do think there’s a lot of merit, even in this day in age of stats and wanting to score a lot of points,” O’Connell said.
From his comments, it seems game situation might be playing into the lack of deep looks and low average depth of target numbers. Last season Cousins threw 90 passes when trailing by at least two scores and averaged 9.5 yards per attempt. That was not an anomaly. If we push that sample size out to 2019, he averaged 8.4 YPA when down by eight or more points. This year he has 52 such attempts, which almost exclusively came against the Eagles, and only picked up 5.7 YPA (per Pro-Football Ref). The point of those numbers is that Cousins previously dominated when opponents’ defenses were playing conservatively with the lead but he hasn’t seen much of that this year, especially since the Eagles turned up their blitzing with the lead.
O’Connell also thinks that having seen a multitude of looks from opposing teams this year versus their passing game they will be able to address some of the shortcomings and have answers in the (unofficial) second half of the season.
“We’ve been defended some different ways than maybe people have put on tape going into games,” O’Connell said. “I think our offense has garnered some different types of coverage structures, front structures, personnel matches, base defense, certain third-down coverages for Justin, and red zone coverages for our personnel, so I think we’re going to be able to look at through these six games, and yes, I think we can do a lot of things better.”
The Vikings rank 20th in offensive yards, 15th in team QB rating, and 19th in yards per pass attempt when adjusted for sacks and interceptions. Even with a manageable schedule going forward, those numbers aren’t reflective of an offense that can carry the team if needed. The difference could end up being whether they can find ways during the bye to unlock more explosive plays.
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