Are the 3-1 Minnesota Vikings a Good Football Team? The Jury's Still Out
Four games into the 2022 Minnesota Vikings season, Kevin O'Connell's team remains a bit of an enigma.
Sunday's win over the Saints in London moved the Vikings to 3-1. They've bounced back from a rough loss to the Eagles with a pair of dramatic victories, and they sit atop the NFC North standings thanks to their tiebreaker over the Packers. O'Connell is off to the best start by a Vikings head coach since Dennis Green won five of his first six games in 1992. Justin Jefferson is back among the league leaders in receiving after another huge performance.
So what's the problem?
Well, there isn't a problem just yet. The Vikings are thrilled to be 3-1 as they begin looking ahead to next Sunday's home game against the Bears. But their record doesn't tell the whole story. This team is a couple bounces away from being 2-2 or even 1-3, which would be a very different conversation. The Vikings — along with everyone who's watched them closely this year — know they have a lot to improve upon if this season is going to be a successful one.
"There's just a lot to clean up still, similar to coming away after the Lions game with a win," Kirk Cousins said. "You feel great about the win, but you also feel there's a lot you leave out there. We've got to get better. I've got to get better. That's kind of where our focus is."
"I know it's not always the easiest thing to hear, but we're four games into this thing, tons of opportunities for me to coach better, get our guys to be a little bit more consistent," O'Connell said. "Hopefully when we do that, we'll start seeing a little bit more pattern of results where we don't feel like we need to come back in the end."
For a second consecutive week, they found a way to win a nail-biter. Last week, multiple comebacks and some strange coaching decisions by the Lions helped the Vikings win a game they seemed destined to lose. This week, it took a couple generous calls from the officiating crew and a miraculous double doink for Minnesota to walk away victorious in regulation. This team has trailed in the fourth quarter in every game since the opener and fell behind by 14 points in two straight first halves before starting quickly in London.
The bottom line is this: through four games, it's still unclear if these Vikings are a good football team. That's something we'll learn, one way or another, over the coming months.
For a 3-1 squad, the Vikings sure have plenty of areas of concern. It starts with their defense, which hasn't put together two good halves of football since Week 1. For various reasons, new coordinator Ed Donatell's system has bled yardage all year. After a good first half against a Saints team missing its top quarterback, running back, and wide receiver, the second half showcased the issues that plagued the Vikings in their two previous games. Facing little pressure, Andy Dalton picked apart the Vikings' soft zones and moved the ball with ease on each of the Saints' final four drives.
Offensively, the Vikings played a solid game on Sunday but really struggled to finish possessions with touchdowns. Greg Joseph wound up kicking five field goals and making all of them, but an inability to convert in the red zone allowed the Saints to hang around, take a fourth quarter lead, and nearly get the game to overtime.
"We don't want to kick five field goals," Cousins said. "We want to score touchdowns. I think that more success in the red zone would have enabled us to pull away a little bit. That was a disappointment."
There wasn't one particular reason why the Vikings ended up kicking as many field goals as they did. There was a Johnny Mundt drop, followed by a conservative decision from O'Connell to kick on fourth and 1. There were penalties and pressures given up by the offensive line. There were missed reads by Cousins and a ball thrown slightly behind Jefferson that he probably could've come down with.
Regardless, the offense needs to be better. The O-line struggled, drops remain an issue, the running game hardly got going, and Cousins was somewhat inconsistent, although he came through when it mattered most.
"We're a long ways away," Adam Thielen said. "With the new system, new coaches, new staff, new organization, we're a long ways away. Again, that's a good thing. Being 3-1 through four games, it's a really long season, but we gotta have a little bit of a sense of urgency to kind of go correct 'em and not keep making the same mistakes and hurting ourselves kind of game after game."
O'Connell appears to have the Vikings heading in the right direction, both with his football acumen and his general leadership. But so far, the biggest difference between this year and last year might just be that the Vikings are getting some bounces to go their way. Two Sundays in a row, they've found a way to pull out a victory in a game they easily could've lost. Whether that's a sign of good coaching or dumb luck is open to interpretation.
Despite everything that needs to be cleaned up, all that really matters right now is that the Vikings are 3-1. As players and coaches love to say, it's much more fun to work on fixing mistakes after a win than it is after a loss. It's so hard to win in the NFL that teams will take victories however they can get them.
A pessimist might argue that the Vikings are a team due for regression, that their record masks some significant flaws. That could prove to be true. An optimist might counter by pointing out that the Vikings are just four games into a new era with new schemes, aren't playing their best football, and are 3-1 anyways. There's so much room for improvement, but the Vikings might actually have the pieces to make that improvement and start winning games more comfortably. A home game against a bad Bears team is a great opportunity to put together four quarters of clean football and extend the winning streak to three.
Only time will tell if the 2022 Vikings turn out to be a good team, or perhaps even a great one. But success in professional sports is measured in wins and losses. So as the Vikings flew back to the United States on Sunday night, with another week of preparation ahead of them, what mattered most is that they found a way to get the job done again.
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