Revisiting the Bradford Trade

The Yannick trade really was inconsequential, what did it turn out we moved back one round we had a gazillion picks... who cares...

Take your chances. Me personally I thought that 2019 team was a major underachiever in the regular season and next to the 49ers I think we were the second best team in that conference. And by the outcome of the playoffs and how the Packers perform against San Fran and next week I think it would be hard to prove me wrong.

I knew we were going to beat the Saints, we were a better team than that 13 win Saints team that we would go into their building and beat them. We were just a better team, we had more talent on paper, And water seeks its own level in the playoffs.

I'm just a type of person that would rather stick with what we have and take aggressive chances on top of it. Because let's face it if you get enough of those things wrong eventually the team will be talentless and then you'll have no choice but to tear it down and it'll be perfectly fine to take that risk.

Right now we have a lot of things going for us. We have some really good players on this team. We just need somebody to organize them and get the maximum results out of them.

Zimmer was the perfect coach for the 2017 team, Not so much for this team.

Rick is not someone I want making trades when blood is in the water so to speak. The reality is Bradford was a backup, and an expensive one for sure. I know Philly was looking for a lot, but during the offseason we might have had him for a less than we paid. That said, it wasn't one of Rick's worst moves, and that's probably my bigger complaint.

The Bradford Trade: it's like the fruitcake you receive from family that just sits on your counter during the Holiday season and never goes away...

I was a fan that was initially against the Bradford trade and would have rather taken our chances with Hill and acquiring a QB off the proverbial "scrap heap" in case Hill wasn't able to make it through all 16 games, and the primary driver was that the cost was too high (1st Rd pick), especially for someone with Bradford's injury history. Yes, the initial design from Norv was Bridgewater leading his downfield passing attack on offense, but I think the team proved in that 2015 Wk 17 win in Green Bay that gave us the NFC North Title (and even in the subsequent Wild Card game vs Seattle) that the team would win not through a high-powered downfield strategy, but through a "game management" style on offense (ie, Alex Smith) while Zimmer's defense would hold team's to few pts and get off the field on 3rd down. And to that end, I didn't think it was worth bringing in Bradford when the strategy of relying on a solid defense and "game management" style offense when the veteran Hill and other "scrap heap" QB could possibly replicate that.

...and the 2017 season is actually that same thought coming to fruition, when the Vikes backup QB, Case Keenum (under the eye of Shurmur), was able to "manage" and/or "guide" the Vikings offense while they relied primarily on the defense to get off the field and into favorable field positions. Could Hill and/or a "scrap heap" QB had similar results in 2016? Probably not with the level of injuries we sustained (wouldn't have mattered so much who was QB'ing)...so even though Bradford miraculously was able to survive 15 games behind our porous OL in 2016 (a minor miracle in-and-of-itself considering his injury history), he ended up being a very accurate and very expensive game manager, in a somewhat similar fashion to Cousins - who we're paying more for in cap dollars that what we're getting in return. And regardless of who was QB'ing the 2017 NFC Championship in Philly, it wouldn't have mattered as the defense totally collapsed in that game and it got away from them.

In terms of the "aggression" of GM's and whether or not they should "go all in" at certain times, there are certainly times when teams should and other times when they shouldn't - and although most teams/GM's will fail here and there - the successful one's are usually finding the right times more consistently. I actually still give Childress praise for making the move to get Favre in 2009: we all knew Tavaris Jackson wasn't the answer and Childress finally admitted it himself when he took the plane ride down to Hattiesburg - that was a time for being aggressive while we still had a potent offense and needed a veteran QB to actually make teams pay for loading the box to stop AP - and it nearly paid off. 2016? Not so much, as the strength of the team at that time wasn't the potent offense, but rather the Top 5 defense and game management offense and you didn't need a shiny new corvette to commute to work when all you needed was a regular 4-dr sedan...

Ironically and unfortunately for the team and fans, Rick didn't learn the "overpaying" lesson of the Bradford Trade and continued down the path with "overpaying" for Cousins (even extending him) and preseason trades that continue the tradition of not working out (Yannick, Herndon). And when you combine that with Zimmer continuing to not make the necessary coaching adjustments - something that plagued him during that 2017 NFC Championship game - you get a team with a front office and Head Coach who continue to try and do the same thing over and over and recapture that initial 2015 success and never pivot to a new strategy when the situation calls for it....and that is why many Vikings fans are ready for the Rick/Zimmer "era" to end and to look ahead to another regime with a different strategy...

lol this post makes me confirm you are just a troll if you didnt state the main reason Bradford didnt make it in the league long...INJURY

Any record of your thoughts of this trade at the 5-0 point?

Hindsight is always 20/20. I'd love to see the real thoughts of the fan base at the time... I really doubt you guys wanted to flush the season before it started, let alone were againat the trade at 5-0...

A trade that was doomed from the start for a bad QB that the team who had him didn't want that ended up taking the cap space and 1st round pick we gave them to build the SB team that beat us in the NFCCG.

Yet people still defend the trade to this day...