Can ya tackle somebody already?!

The Minnesota Vikings ceded 208 rushing yards en route to their sixth loss of the season. Any 200-yard rushing day is a bad day, but perhaps more frustrating is the way it manifested. While PFF only credited the Vikings with seven missed tackles, the San Francisco 49er forced more poor tackling opportunities. This led to 152 of those 208 rushing yards coming after contact with a Vikings defender.

What gives? Mike Zimmer has boasted some of the best-tackling teams in football over his time as the Vikings’ head coach. Many of those players are still in the building. Why is it suddenly so hard to bring down the ballcarrier?

Granted, the Vikings were missing a lot of players in this game. Everson Griffen, Danielle Hunter, Dalvin Tomlinson, and Michael Pierce all missed the game. Some are out for the season. Anthony Barr did not complete the contest and Nick Vigil also missed some snaps. To simply chalk it up to an injury issue would be to make unearned excuses. Like Andre Patterson said before the game, that depth is meant to play, not to be hidden. Something more is going on here.

The Vikings don’t seem to have a fundamental problem with tackling. Rather, they have a problem setting up good tackles. They aren’t leaving their feet or attacking too high or making any other mistake that a high school coach would try to iron out of his freshmen. Rather, the most subtle nuances of offense and defense are leaving the Vikings in incredibly difficult positions. From there, they have no choice but to dive at whatever piece of the ballcarrier they can get their hands on.

Without this problem, the Vikings tackled fine. They are not a fundamentally unsound team, at least not on defense. But what led the Vikings out of position requires an incredibly detailed look at the chess match between Zimmer’s defense and Kyle Shanahan’s offense. If Shanahan simply outdueled Zimmer, that’s one thing. Shanahan is one of the most highly respected offensive minds in the game. What we really have to fear is the possibility that Shanahan exposed a fatal flaw in Zimmer’s vaunted defense.

It seems like Shanahan’s unique style of offense caused the Vikings to tackle uniquely poorly in this game. If other teams can replicate Shanahan’s brand, they may be able to replicate this result. The Detroit Lions, in particular, run a “Shanahan-lite” scheme that utilizes motions and shifts in the same way. The Lions aren’t as good at it as Shanahan’s 49ers, but challenges may still present themselves, much like they did last time. The Vikings need to get better at diving tackles — or better at preventing them in the first place.