Post by Purple Pain on Mar 4, 2021 17:54:24 GMT -6
Some think the 2020 Vikings were "who they thought they were" - and others felt they were more so unlucky than necessarily being bad. Let's dive in...
Purple Insider: How unlucky were the Vikings in 2020? by Sam Ekstrom
purpleinsider.substack.com/p/how-unlucky-were-the-vikings-in-2020
Purple Insider: How unlucky were the Vikings in 2020? by Sam Ekstrom
No team seesaws between success and failure like the Minnesota Vikings, particularly the Vikings of the Mike Zimmer Era that have now alternated playoff seasons and non-playoff seasons for seven straight years and are still looking for their first back-to-back playoff trips since 2008-09.
Zimmer’s up-and-down tenure is an example of the NFL’s parity — wonderful for the balance of power in the league; frustrating for fans of franchises like the Vikings who perpetually appear to be on the verge of breaking through, only to take two steps back.
The variables that contribute to an NFL team’s success or failure are innumerable, but if you want to boil it down, you could put it like this: Teams that win usually don’t have too many things go wrong, and when things do go awry, they have a strong enough foundation built to absorb those mishaps. The Vikings of 2020 had a lot go wrong, and they lacked the depth to withstand it. Their misfortune might’ve been avoided with better roster-building in the offseason — or perhaps a few different bounces in the regular season.
The small sample size of the NFL season leaves the door open for luck to play a role. It’s never the only factor, but it isn’t meaningless when it comes to projecting team’s futures. ESPN’s Bill Barnwell projects risers and fallers each year based on suspicious factors like injury luck and other unsustainable patterns. Over the past four seasons, 16 out of the 20 teams Barnwell predicted wound up declining, three kept the same record and only one improved (last year’s Seattle Seahawks). Conversely, 15 of his 20 improvement candidates boosted their win total. Bottom line: It’s not unrealistic to handicap a team’s upcoming season based on the data from their previous year.
Granted, it’s relatively easy to forecast decline for double-digit winners or improvement for the league’s worst teams. It’s more difficult for a team teetering around the .500 mark like the Vikings, but that’s what we’ll try to do here. How lucky/unlucky were the Vikings last year, and do those signs point toward a positive or negative regression?
Injuries
This is obviously the most common excuse made for the 2020 Vikings, which even their head coach started leaning into late in the season when the Vikings lost three in a row and saw their ravaged defense get steamrolled.
“We're missing four defensive linemen, we're missing a safety, we're missing three corners, we're missing six linebackers, I believe, from where we started,” Zimmer said after a loss in Week 16 that he called embarrassing. “We're just a little undermanned. That's still no excuse. These guys put on an NFL jersey they've got to play."
The worst part of the Vikings’ 2020 injuries were that most of them occurred on one side of the ball. Danielle Hunter (16 games), Anthony Barr (14 games), Eric Kendricks (five games), Michael Pierce (16 games via opt out) and multiple cornerbacks left Minnesota extra-weakened on defense, even though their total games lost to injury was around league average.
ManGamesLost.com tracks injury analytics and found the Vikings to be bunched in the middle of the pack with between 150 and 200 man games lost due to injury. Keep in mind, this total doesn’t include Pierce, but that means it also doesn’t include other teams’ opt-outs who might’ve had it worse than the Vikings. It’s worth noting that six playoff teams withstood as many or more games missed due to injury than Minnesota.
However, the size of the bubbles in the chart above demonstrate the value of teams’ missing players. Most of the playoff teams had awfully small bubbles, while a club like San Francisco was a clear outlier with 326 games lost, many by extremely valuable players. Per ManGamesLost, the Vikings were impacted fifth-most by injuries, based on career quality of their lost players. None of the four teams above them (San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas and the Los Angeles Chargers) made the playoffs either.
Just as Minnesota’s improbably good health in 2019 forecast injury regression in 2020, their poor injury luck last year could forecast better things in 2021, especially with Pierce added to the mix. Presumably, most of those key injured players will return barring any surprise cuts or trades.
Said Zimmer late last season: “We've got to get Hunter back, we've got to get Pierce here, we've got to get Barr, Kendricks, Pro Bowl players, good players that we have, they need to be back.”
One-possession games
Teams can usually point to one or two close games that swung their season. For the 2020 Vikings, most people point to the loss at Seattle that came down to an absurd sequence of events that included a missed fourth-down rush by Alexander Mattison, followed by two fourth-down conversions from Russell Wilson to D.K. Metcalf that effectively won the game — success on any of those three plays would’ve changed the result in the Vikings’ favor.
Not all one-possession losses are as crushing as that one, but a lot them end up being coin flips down the stretch. Believe it or not, Minnesota was actually a beneficiary of the one-possession-game statistic by the end of the season. The Vikings went 6-4 in those games and were the only team out of seven to miss the playoffs with six or more one-possession wins (Kansas City, Seattle, Cleveland, Tennessee, Pittsburgh and Chicago were the others).
Let’s remember some of Minnesota’s victories. Their 31-23 victory over Houston could’ve gone to overtime if not for a very borderline overturn that wiped a Texans touchdown off the board in the final seconds. They had to sweat out a last-minute drive by Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau Field to hang on 28-22. Their fourth-quarter comeback to beat the Panthers by one point was unlikely and hinged on Joey Slye missing a long field goal as time expired. Their overtime win the following week versus Jacksonville could’ve gone either way. And their 37-35 win in the meaningless Week 17 game was strongly influenced by some shoddy officiating in their favor down the stretch.
So it wasn’t as if the Vikings had no luck all year. Of course, the four one-possession losses still stung. Seattle was the worst, followed by a one-point loss to Tennessee where Stephen Gostkowski hammered a long field goal late to give the Titans the lead. The three-point loss to Dallas was mostly a defensive meltdown and a disjointed two-minute drill. And the Vikings were pretty badly outplayed in the six-point loss to Chicago and couldn’t convert a Hail Mary at the end. At the end of the day, their four one-possession losses were tied for 14th-most in the league, basically right in the middle.
There were actually more games the Vikings were lucky to win down the stretch than the other way around. Sure, they were one win from making the playoffs, but they could’ve easily been a 5-11 team with a couple different bounces.
Fumble luck
Fumble scrums are among football’s most random plays. Forced fumbles are historically unsustainable; recovering those fumbles even less so.
There isn’t necessarily a strong correlation between recovering fumbles and winning Super Bowls. But influencing turnover margin with more fumble recoveries can change the outcome of several games a year. The Vikings of 2019 were second in the league at 62.1% recovery rate. Predictably, that plunged to 48.7% last year, 18th in the NFL.
Great fumble recovering didn’t exactly help the teams that were best at it last year, however. The top seven were Carolina, Philadelphia, Chicago, New England, Arizona, Pittsburgh and Miami, who won a combined zero playoff games.
In the Vikings’ case, they’ve been on both ends of the spectrum. Before their extremely positive fumble luck season in 2019, they were 32nd in 2018 and 31st in 2017 — two seasons with very different outcomes. Again, fumble luck isn’t everything.
Put simply, though, the 2020 Vikings went 1-7 in games where they lost the take-give, and they lost the take-give in three of their one-possession losses. Each of those defeats involved a lost fumble.
Recover more fumbles, swing more close games. The Vikings didn’t do that in 2020. Odds are 2021 will be better, but it’s no guarantee.
Out-of-character performances
Finally, we’ll consider who played better or worse than their career body of work would otherwise indicate. In essence, the Vikings got mostly solid seasons from those who were expected to play well but didn’t get enough production from unexpected sources that could’ve made an impact (like K.J. Osborn being a surprise WR3 or Troy Dye playing great in relief of Barr).
In the cases of Dalvin Cook and Adam Thielen, their strong seasons were around what we’ve come to expect when healthy. Cook was less productive in the second half of the season because of injuries, but since that’s been typical for his career, it’s arguably something he’ll have to deal with going forward. Thielen didn’t have a 1,000-yard season, but he was dynamite in the red zone and saw a lot of targets go the way of Justin Jefferson. If anything, he could see more production in 2021.
Jefferson’s trajectory probably demands its own article. Only 11 receivers have recorded back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons to start their career, but for a player of Jefferson’s apparent caliber, it wouldn’t be earth-shattering for him to come close to 1,400 yards again, especially with a higher target share. Jefferson did enjoy extremely good health in 2020, which may not last forever, but he seemed to avoid the rookie wall late in the season and could easily dodge the sophomore slump, too.
On offense, there’s probably more reason to be concerned about regression for Riley Reiff, who had a career season at age 32. But it’s also improbable the Vikings will have the league’s worst guard play a second straight year, so we’ll call it a wash on the offensive line.
Defensively, it’s tough to say many players exceeded or failed to reach their career standards except for Anthony Harris, who struggled on the back end and may not return to the team. Otherwise, most of the rookies were up and down, the Pro Bowl-level veterans like Harrison Smith and Kendricks generally played well when healthy, and the patchwork defensive line played about as poorly as you’d expect for the talent that was assembled.
Honestly, the woeful special teams might represent the biggest opportunity for improvement. Dan Bailey’s field goal percentage dipped 19% off his career average, and his extra-point percentage dipped 10% from his career mark since the league moved the point-after back to 33 yards. Britton Colquitt was 0.1 yards off a career low in net punt, set a career low in inside-the-20 percentage and was above his career average in touchback percentage. The team also had to make a mid-season longsnapper change.
Minnesota finished 31st in special teams DVOA last year and unofficially ranked first in mind-blowing special teams blunders. With new coordinator Ryan Ficken at the helm, it’s reasonable to expect vast improvement in that area that could trickle down to the other units.
If we’ve learned anything here, it’s that the Vikings were on the unlucky side in 2020. Injuries eliminated their margin for error, then awful special teams, poor fumble luck and below-average production from their replacement-level players put them deeper in a hole. Their 6-4 record in one-possession games kept them afloat in the playoff race for awhile, but they didn’t catch many other breaks.
Digging out in 2021 will still demand smart offseason management, but probability says the Vikings are due for better luck next season. I’m not saying you should spend your mortgage on the Vegas win total line, however. The offseason has barely started…
Zimmer’s up-and-down tenure is an example of the NFL’s parity — wonderful for the balance of power in the league; frustrating for fans of franchises like the Vikings who perpetually appear to be on the verge of breaking through, only to take two steps back.
The variables that contribute to an NFL team’s success or failure are innumerable, but if you want to boil it down, you could put it like this: Teams that win usually don’t have too many things go wrong, and when things do go awry, they have a strong enough foundation built to absorb those mishaps. The Vikings of 2020 had a lot go wrong, and they lacked the depth to withstand it. Their misfortune might’ve been avoided with better roster-building in the offseason — or perhaps a few different bounces in the regular season.
The small sample size of the NFL season leaves the door open for luck to play a role. It’s never the only factor, but it isn’t meaningless when it comes to projecting team’s futures. ESPN’s Bill Barnwell projects risers and fallers each year based on suspicious factors like injury luck and other unsustainable patterns. Over the past four seasons, 16 out of the 20 teams Barnwell predicted wound up declining, three kept the same record and only one improved (last year’s Seattle Seahawks). Conversely, 15 of his 20 improvement candidates boosted their win total. Bottom line: It’s not unrealistic to handicap a team’s upcoming season based on the data from their previous year.
Granted, it’s relatively easy to forecast decline for double-digit winners or improvement for the league’s worst teams. It’s more difficult for a team teetering around the .500 mark like the Vikings, but that’s what we’ll try to do here. How lucky/unlucky were the Vikings last year, and do those signs point toward a positive or negative regression?
Injuries
This is obviously the most common excuse made for the 2020 Vikings, which even their head coach started leaning into late in the season when the Vikings lost three in a row and saw their ravaged defense get steamrolled.
“We're missing four defensive linemen, we're missing a safety, we're missing three corners, we're missing six linebackers, I believe, from where we started,” Zimmer said after a loss in Week 16 that he called embarrassing. “We're just a little undermanned. That's still no excuse. These guys put on an NFL jersey they've got to play."
The worst part of the Vikings’ 2020 injuries were that most of them occurred on one side of the ball. Danielle Hunter (16 games), Anthony Barr (14 games), Eric Kendricks (five games), Michael Pierce (16 games via opt out) and multiple cornerbacks left Minnesota extra-weakened on defense, even though their total games lost to injury was around league average.
ManGamesLost.com tracks injury analytics and found the Vikings to be bunched in the middle of the pack with between 150 and 200 man games lost due to injury. Keep in mind, this total doesn’t include Pierce, but that means it also doesn’t include other teams’ opt-outs who might’ve had it worse than the Vikings. It’s worth noting that six playoff teams withstood as many or more games missed due to injury than Minnesota.
However, the size of the bubbles in the chart above demonstrate the value of teams’ missing players. Most of the playoff teams had awfully small bubbles, while a club like San Francisco was a clear outlier with 326 games lost, many by extremely valuable players. Per ManGamesLost, the Vikings were impacted fifth-most by injuries, based on career quality of their lost players. None of the four teams above them (San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas and the Los Angeles Chargers) made the playoffs either.
Just as Minnesota’s improbably good health in 2019 forecast injury regression in 2020, their poor injury luck last year could forecast better things in 2021, especially with Pierce added to the mix. Presumably, most of those key injured players will return barring any surprise cuts or trades.
Said Zimmer late last season: “We've got to get Hunter back, we've got to get Pierce here, we've got to get Barr, Kendricks, Pro Bowl players, good players that we have, they need to be back.”
One-possession games
Teams can usually point to one or two close games that swung their season. For the 2020 Vikings, most people point to the loss at Seattle that came down to an absurd sequence of events that included a missed fourth-down rush by Alexander Mattison, followed by two fourth-down conversions from Russell Wilson to D.K. Metcalf that effectively won the game — success on any of those three plays would’ve changed the result in the Vikings’ favor.
Not all one-possession losses are as crushing as that one, but a lot them end up being coin flips down the stretch. Believe it or not, Minnesota was actually a beneficiary of the one-possession-game statistic by the end of the season. The Vikings went 6-4 in those games and were the only team out of seven to miss the playoffs with six or more one-possession wins (Kansas City, Seattle, Cleveland, Tennessee, Pittsburgh and Chicago were the others).
Let’s remember some of Minnesota’s victories. Their 31-23 victory over Houston could’ve gone to overtime if not for a very borderline overturn that wiped a Texans touchdown off the board in the final seconds. They had to sweat out a last-minute drive by Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau Field to hang on 28-22. Their fourth-quarter comeback to beat the Panthers by one point was unlikely and hinged on Joey Slye missing a long field goal as time expired. Their overtime win the following week versus Jacksonville could’ve gone either way. And their 37-35 win in the meaningless Week 17 game was strongly influenced by some shoddy officiating in their favor down the stretch.
So it wasn’t as if the Vikings had no luck all year. Of course, the four one-possession losses still stung. Seattle was the worst, followed by a one-point loss to Tennessee where Stephen Gostkowski hammered a long field goal late to give the Titans the lead. The three-point loss to Dallas was mostly a defensive meltdown and a disjointed two-minute drill. And the Vikings were pretty badly outplayed in the six-point loss to Chicago and couldn’t convert a Hail Mary at the end. At the end of the day, their four one-possession losses were tied for 14th-most in the league, basically right in the middle.
There were actually more games the Vikings were lucky to win down the stretch than the other way around. Sure, they were one win from making the playoffs, but they could’ve easily been a 5-11 team with a couple different bounces.
Fumble luck
Fumble scrums are among football’s most random plays. Forced fumbles are historically unsustainable; recovering those fumbles even less so.
There isn’t necessarily a strong correlation between recovering fumbles and winning Super Bowls. But influencing turnover margin with more fumble recoveries can change the outcome of several games a year. The Vikings of 2019 were second in the league at 62.1% recovery rate. Predictably, that plunged to 48.7% last year, 18th in the NFL.
Great fumble recovering didn’t exactly help the teams that were best at it last year, however. The top seven were Carolina, Philadelphia, Chicago, New England, Arizona, Pittsburgh and Miami, who won a combined zero playoff games.
In the Vikings’ case, they’ve been on both ends of the spectrum. Before their extremely positive fumble luck season in 2019, they were 32nd in 2018 and 31st in 2017 — two seasons with very different outcomes. Again, fumble luck isn’t everything.
Put simply, though, the 2020 Vikings went 1-7 in games where they lost the take-give, and they lost the take-give in three of their one-possession losses. Each of those defeats involved a lost fumble.
Recover more fumbles, swing more close games. The Vikings didn’t do that in 2020. Odds are 2021 will be better, but it’s no guarantee.
Out-of-character performances
Finally, we’ll consider who played better or worse than their career body of work would otherwise indicate. In essence, the Vikings got mostly solid seasons from those who were expected to play well but didn’t get enough production from unexpected sources that could’ve made an impact (like K.J. Osborn being a surprise WR3 or Troy Dye playing great in relief of Barr).
In the cases of Dalvin Cook and Adam Thielen, their strong seasons were around what we’ve come to expect when healthy. Cook was less productive in the second half of the season because of injuries, but since that’s been typical for his career, it’s arguably something he’ll have to deal with going forward. Thielen didn’t have a 1,000-yard season, but he was dynamite in the red zone and saw a lot of targets go the way of Justin Jefferson. If anything, he could see more production in 2021.
Jefferson’s trajectory probably demands its own article. Only 11 receivers have recorded back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons to start their career, but for a player of Jefferson’s apparent caliber, it wouldn’t be earth-shattering for him to come close to 1,400 yards again, especially with a higher target share. Jefferson did enjoy extremely good health in 2020, which may not last forever, but he seemed to avoid the rookie wall late in the season and could easily dodge the sophomore slump, too.
On offense, there’s probably more reason to be concerned about regression for Riley Reiff, who had a career season at age 32. But it’s also improbable the Vikings will have the league’s worst guard play a second straight year, so we’ll call it a wash on the offensive line.
Defensively, it’s tough to say many players exceeded or failed to reach their career standards except for Anthony Harris, who struggled on the back end and may not return to the team. Otherwise, most of the rookies were up and down, the Pro Bowl-level veterans like Harrison Smith and Kendricks generally played well when healthy, and the patchwork defensive line played about as poorly as you’d expect for the talent that was assembled.
Honestly, the woeful special teams might represent the biggest opportunity for improvement. Dan Bailey’s field goal percentage dipped 19% off his career average, and his extra-point percentage dipped 10% from his career mark since the league moved the point-after back to 33 yards. Britton Colquitt was 0.1 yards off a career low in net punt, set a career low in inside-the-20 percentage and was above his career average in touchback percentage. The team also had to make a mid-season longsnapper change.
Minnesota finished 31st in special teams DVOA last year and unofficially ranked first in mind-blowing special teams blunders. With new coordinator Ryan Ficken at the helm, it’s reasonable to expect vast improvement in that area that could trickle down to the other units.
If we’ve learned anything here, it’s that the Vikings were on the unlucky side in 2020. Injuries eliminated their margin for error, then awful special teams, poor fumble luck and below-average production from their replacement-level players put them deeper in a hole. Their 6-4 record in one-possession games kept them afloat in the playoff race for awhile, but they didn’t catch many other breaks.
Digging out in 2021 will still demand smart offseason management, but probability says the Vikings are due for better luck next season. I’m not saying you should spend your mortgage on the Vegas win total line, however. The offseason has barely started…
... and neither is this Chris guy.