Can the 2020 Vikings be fixed?

Ever since the Vikings were trounced by the Colts on Sunday — which came a week after getting steamrolled by the division-rival Packers — some fans have been ready for a hard reset of the franchise. There are various structural factors that make that difficult — not the least of which is Kirk Cousins’ contract extension — but before any of that can be reasonably discussed, the real question might need to be whether the season is truly lost.

At 0-2, the Vikings are technically not out of it. If FiveThirtyEight is to be believed, the Vikings actually have a 18 percent likelihood to make the playoffs in the new 14-team format, and the average team, historically, has had an 11 percent chance.



Initially billed as playoff hopefuls, the Vikings are now struggling to prove their relevance in a less-than-impressive NFC North.

They’ve been in dire straits before under Mike Zimmer. The Vikings’ 2-2 start last year manifested in internal drama before they went on a 4-0 run for the next quarter of the season and made the playoffs by the end — despite playing with only one of their star receivers for most of that time. Their 2-2 start in 2017 was precipitated by a season-ending injury to the starting quarterback and they still made a run and finished 13-3, despite the backup struggling through two of the first three games.

But can they dig out of it this season? The task was made more difficult this week when the Vikings announced a season-ending injury to Anthony Barr. Barr has a unique role in the defense, separating him from other linebackers in the league. Because of his skillset as a pass-rusher, run defender and coverage defender, Barr offers the unique ability to allow the Vikings to dictate their defensive strategy. If there’s a quarterback vulnerable to blitzing, Barr will rush the passer more often. If they can’t handle underneath coverage defenders, Barr will lurk in the hook/curl zone. If they respond to pressure with receiver screens, Barr flies to the sideline to shut them down. Without him, an already strained Vikings defense will likely be more reactive rather than proactive in their gameplans.

Turning a 18-percent chance into reality requires a few bounces of the ball, assertive measures to account for their deficits and turnaround from individual players. Here’s one path to making it happen.

Return of the ‘normal’ Kirk Cousins

Offensively, there are potentially dozens of areas for improvement, but we’ll isolate three.

The most significant area comes from the quarterback position. Even if Cousins isn’t the biggest worry for the Vikings, he’s never been the solution either — and for a quarterback with his salary, that’s alarming.

The Vikings passing game has been abysmal in 2020. Cousins ranks dead last in expected points when excluding game situations where the win probability is five percent or less for either team, and the gap isn’t particularly close.

His success rate — the rate at which he generates plays that produce positive expected points — is last by an even larger margin. Last year, he was among the leaders in completion rate above expected — an NFL Next Gen stat that calculated throw probabilities based on distance downfield, distance to sideline, the separation of the receiver, quarterback pressure and so on — and now he ranks last.



The Vikings offensive line has been a problem too, but they’ve mitigated it in various ways without decreasing their passing depth or time to throw. Cousins only ranks 14th in pressure rate (per NFL Next Gen Stats) but has the third-longest time to throw and has the third-deepest depth of throw. Pro Football Focus is slightly more worried about his pressure environment, ranking his as the 12th-highest. Nevertheless, these pressure rates are manageable and understandable given the lengthy time to throw.

The receivers don’t seem to be giving him many chances with their separation, but the data tells a somewhat different story as well — at time of throw, the Vikings receivers ranked 22nd of 32 teams in average separation. At time of catch, however, they ranked last.

This loosely implies — though doesn’t prove, especially with a limited sample — that Cousins is creating contested catches unnecessarily or throwing late on routes. The film somewhat confirms this, though other factors are in play too. Not only that, Cousins is significantly less accurate than he was last year, or at any point in his career thus far. He ranks 27th in percentage of aimed passes that weren’t deemed catchable, per Pro Football Focus. Sports Info Solutions, a different tracking company, ranks Cousins 24th.

There’s also something to be said about his decision-making. Of the 32 quarterbacks starting this next weekend, Cousins has the second-highest percentage of plays deemed turnover-worthy by Pro Football Focus, a measure that generally takes away deflected interceptions off of drops and Hail Mary picks but also includes all dropped interceptions by the defense.

Any return to relevance for the Vikings will necessarily involve an improvement from Cousins.

There’s reason to think he can play well going forward. Aside from the fact that he has four years of good play as a starter behind him that we can point to, his play in the Green Bay game doesn’t point to gloom and doom. In those first three quarters, he threw for 95 yards on 11 attempts, which is 8.63 yards per attempt.

We mentioned last week that his efficiency was pretty poor — and that’s true, once we account for sacks and interceptions — but the most projectable statistic is yards per attempt. If we also give some accommodations for miscommunication and drops, it looks even better for Cousins.

Given that some of the sacks weren’t his fault, this might tell us that there’s reason to think he can play well going forward. Sometimes we encounter situations where a player didn’t put together a good performance, but nevertheless showed some signs that they could play well going forward — and that’s kind of what we saw against the Packers.

The quarterback who opened both games with scoring drives is just as much part of the evaluation as the one who has thrown four picks. There’s really just one game of the two where Cousins’ play-to-play performance was so poor that it forces us to ask if this is all there is.

Coming off the worst game of his career, he’s unlikely to replicate that level of play again this season and will almost certainly move closer to his career level as he has generally done after poor performances.

Defensively, it’s a bit more difficult. It’s one thing to expect one inexperienced player to turn things around and improve his trajectory. It’s another to expect that of three players at cornerback and one or two players along the defensive line.

The first thing that needs to happen — and won’t for Sunday’s Titans game, but can afterwards — is the return of Danielle Hunter. Some might be worried about Yannick Ngakoue’s production, but he was actually excellent against the Colts and looks to be in fine form. He generated a pressure rate of 16.0 percent against Rivers, something that over the course of a full year would be elite. It’s likely he’ll regress back to his seasonal 14.0 percent, but given what he did after spending a week with the team, prospects for him are good.

Right now, the pressure rates for the defensive line on the field when it’s composed of Shamar Stephen, Jaleel Johnson, Ifeadi Odenigbo and Ngakoue — using their historical numbers — is approximately 27.2 percent, which is worse than the approximate pressure rate of any team’s top four linemen from 2019.

Replacing the relatively poor pressure rate of Odenigbo with Hunter — at a pressure rate of 16.5 percent, instead of just below 10 percent — has the chance to boost that up to 36.2 percent, about league average.

That goes up if they can get more out of their defensive interior pass-rush. Having an elite duo at end is excellent, but without complementary pressure, a lot of pass rushes can fall dead. If Armon Watts develops, they have an option there. His pressure rate could be comfortably above Johnson’s approximate 5.0 percent career pressure rate, but he needs to play better than he did against the Colts. If he replaces Johnson and that shifts Johnson back to the nose tackle position, they have an opportunity to create even more pressure.

Right now, all the Vikings need to do is get out of the basement when it comes to pressure from their front four. The way D.J. Wonnum, Jalyn Holmes and Odenigbo have played exceeds that of backup ends, but it doesn’t quite cut it for starting edge rushers on a high-level defense. Hunter’s return is critical to their pressure effort.

Holding on to Stephen for his supposed prowess in the running game is preventing them from adequately making quarterbacks uncomfortable. We can even use average performance under pressure to figure out those differences. An average quarterback jumps from 15th in adjusted net yards per attempt to 10th if they face league-low pressure rates. Conversely, that same quarterback falls to 18th or worse when facing high pressure rates.

This essentially means that they’re making a quarterback with the production history of Derek Carr look like Deshaun Watson if they can’t at least hit league-average pressure rates. And they make Watson look like Russell Wilson.

If they can reduce opponent quarterback performance through pressure alone, that will go a long way into ensuring that the defense is no longer a liability when the offense drives down the field in an attempt to score. But the Vikings will probably want a bit more than that.