Photo by Bailey Hillesheim/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

On Sunday against the Dolphins, the Vikings, favored by 10.5 points, fucked up. They constantly fucked up. They fucked up so much that it’s hard to find the plays where they didn’t fuck up.

They’re fucking up at historically unprecedented levels. Breaking fuckup barriers. Disrupting the status quo of the fuckup industry.

Did the Vikings just fuck up, or are they perpetual fuckups? Where is that line? How many fuckups can a fuckup fuck up before they, themselves, get fucked up?

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If I tried to catalog every mistake of the Vikings offense in Week 4, we’d be here forever. I have to narrow my scope to something more manageable. So I’ll choose to focus more on operational mistakes, like miscommunications, misalignments, and procedural penalties.

As such, I have an insultingly simple goal for the Vikings. Call a play, communicate that play’s instructions to all eleven players, then have everyone at least attempt the correct assignment. If the snap happens and a play of some sort happens, whether good or bad, I’ll hold my tongue.

The bar is on the floor.

Let’s see who still tripped over it.

Table of Contents

Fuckup 1 

9:30 — 1st: (Shotgun) PENALTY on MIN-B.O'Neill, False Start, 5 yards, enforced at MIA 33 — No Play.

When someone false starts, whose fault is it? That may be a silly question, but there are many ways for a false start to manifest. The most common is this kind, from Brian O’Neill. Kyler Murray executes a hard count, and O’Neill flinches.

Assigning blame here is pretty cut and dry. Zeek Biggers flinched a little on Murray’s hard count, and O’Neill reacted. That’s five yards.

There are two other false starts — from Caleb Tiernan and Joe Huber — that are similarly matters of discipline, and not organizational chaos. They do not crack the top ten of fuckups on the day, to give you a sense for the adventure we’re about to brave together. But I figure all three warranted a spot on the list.

More on false starts later.

Fuckup 2

0:56 — 1st: K.Murray pass deep left to J.Addison to MIA 48 for 21 yards (C.Johnson; J.Marshall).PENALTY on MIN, Illegal Formation, 5 yards, enforced at MIN 31 — No Play.

The Vikings peppered in a 6th OL on Sunday, likely in an effort to prey on smaller edge defenders Chop Robinson (265lb) and Josh Uche (252lb). A perfectly sensible gameplan, but it means a rookie has to go out there and get lined up.

So every time he goes out there, someone has to report that the guy wearing 78 is eligible so the ref can announce it to the stadium (thanks, Belichick). Then, he has the same rules as, say, a tight end. 

Tiernan lines up “on the ball”, which referees determine by the center’s belt. If your helmet is past his belt, that’s about within a yard of the ball, so you’re on the ball. You may have seen this used to determine tackles who are too far off. 

This is a twofold problem: Now, there is an eighth player within a yard of the line of scrimmage (maximum seven) and Tiernan is “covered”, meaning he’s on the ball and there’s another player on the ball outside of him (Jauan Jennings).

According to O’Connell, a receiver (likely Jennings) instructed Tiernan to line up on the ball incorrectly. So Tiernan is the one in the wrong, but Jennings shouldn’t be trying to manage this at all. If it’s not your job, shut the fuck up.

At any rate, five yards, repeat the down. But who fucked up, Tiernan or Jennings? Getting either one off the ball would fix the issue. Let’s look at another, similar formati- Jesus Christ, Tiernan almost fucked up again.

As a rookie, it’s understandable that he hasn’t perfectly memorized the dozens of formations in his playbook. But with that understanding, it’s irresponsible to center a major wrinkle of your gameplan around him. The best play in the world still won’t count if there is an illegal formation.

This is circumstantial evidence, but strong evidence, that Caleb Tiernan did not know the playbook sufficiently, and his teammates knew that. Caleb Tiernan, you fucked up. Jauan Jennings, you also fucked up. At least you fixed him the second time.

Fuckup 3

14:56 — 2nd: (Shotgun) K.Murray sacked at MIN 22 for -8 yards (J.Uche).

We’re to the second quarter, and we’ve now managed to get a snap off. But when Kyler Murray dropped back to pass, he found two guys running the same route.

The Vikings are running some kind of Dagger here, with both Jennings and Tai Felton both running clearout routes on top of each other. That can’t be what we want.

I could guess what else was supposed to be run here. It could be some underneath arrow, or a deep over to occupy help from the other side. But it’s more productive to try and suss out who was wrong between Jennings and Felton, whatever the right route was supposed to be.

I think the culprit is the motion here. When Addison runs a “Cheat” motion to the outside, it changes the order everyone is in. Look at how formations are organized in a similar playbook:

These formations all look the same, but with the players in a different order. Then when you add a play call on to that, you determine who runs what route, like so: 

The play would have looked approximately like this, where the outermost receiver runs the dig, the next receiver runs the clearout route, and so on (the Y was on the backside, and X was split out, but you get the general idea).

When Addison motions, it changes who is who, and therefore who runs which route. This causes confusion. 

I won’t speculate any further on what Felton or Jennings were supposed to run instead. One of them fucked up. Everyone in the huddle knows what happened, and that’s who needs to know. I’ll give them each half of a fuckup as an approximation.

Fuckup 4

11:21 — 2nd: (Shotgun) K.Murray pass short middle to J.Addison to MIN 28 for 1 yard (J.Rodriguez; J.Brooks).PENALTY on MIN-J.Addison, Illegal Shift, 5 yards, enforced at MIN 27 — No Play.

With the Vikings adding a ton of new variety to their motion package, like I predicted this offseason, there’s bound to be some kinks to work out. Here, Jordan Addison commits an infraction by motioning in a way that goes forward and not getting set before the snap.

Note how little he actually goes forward. His foot crosses the 24 yard-line. That’s enough for his motion to now count as a forward shift, CFL-style. By rule, he has to be set for one second, and then he can continue any motion as intended.

But that’s not an option here. As you’ll also note, the play clock is down to 2 seconds. Murray waves Addison over early in an attempt to get the play off, but since he didn’t have time to get set, the motion is illegal.

More on these play clock issues later.

So to find who fucked up, we’d have to know why the pre-snap process was so behind, but again, we can’t really know that if we’re not in the coaching headsets. 

But Addison also didn’t need to motion forward here. To me, this looks like a sloppy track that went forward, and properly run motion wouldn’t run this risk at all. So one way or another, Jordan Addison, you fucked up.

Fuckup 5

9:45 — 2nd: (No Huddle, Shotgun) PENALTY on MIN-J.Huber, False Start, 5 yards, enforced at MIN 41 — No Play.

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

The 2026 Vikings have four wins, zero losses and a pessimistic fanbase.

This isn’t spoiled-fan behavior — when have Vikings fans ever been spoiled? — but mere pattern recognition.

The 2016 Minnesota Vikings had five wins, zero losses and a cautiously hopeful fanbase.

Now, ten years later, the 2016 Vikings have been compressed into a cautionary tale; you can start 5-0 and still miss the playoffs!

But more than a cautionary tale about hot starts, it’s a lesson in something Vikings fans have heard too much about in the last five years: sustainability. Our interpretation of the 2016 experience should be about repeatability and the risks of low offensive production.

That 2016 offense was tepid; they ranked 24th in points per game, and even that was boosted by the defense; they had the fourth-shortest starting field position on scoring drives of NFL teams that season.

In the first game of the season, the Vikings started quarterback Shaun Hill. They had traded for Sam Bradford just a week prior in response to a season-ending injury to Teddy Bridgewater during a team practice. Bradford wasn’t ready quite yet, so Hill led an offense to four field goals.

The Vikings scored two touchdowns in that game, though — Eric Kendricks returned a pick-six for 77 yards, and Danielle Hunter scored on a 24-yard fumble return.

Photo by David E. Klutho /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

The offense would not outscore the defense and special teams in touchdowns until Week 4, when a throw to Kyle Rudolph brought the tally to 4-3 (four touchdowns for the offense, three for the other two units).

The conversation around that team was largely optimistic — why can’t the defense be the engine behind scoring?

The story is well-told at this point. The Vikings lost the next four games and finished 8-8, missing the playoffs. The defense was very good that year, ranking sixth in points per game allowed and second in EPA per play given up.

The offense, through five weeks, only mustered 18.2 points per game. There was reason for concern, especially after having moved heaven and earth (one first-round pick and a conditional fourth) for Bradford.

Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke

Shortly after offensive coordinator Norv Turner announced his resignation, I was visiting my then-girlfriend’s parents and her father asked me why “they would fire” Norv Turner after an undefeated start and just two more losses. After explaining that — technically — he resigned, I also tried to point out that the offense was bad. They might be 5-2, but they weren’t winning in a way that inspired confidence in their ability to keep winning going forward.

It didn’t land. He didn’t like it. Why mess with a good thing?

The concerns about the 2016 offense didn’t go away with Turner’s departure, however. Somehow, they got worse at scoring after that, managing just 16.2 offensive points per game in the weeks that followed, all the way to the end of the season.

The Vikings led the league in non-offensive scoring while dribbling along the bottom of the ranks in scrimmage points scored by the offense. Pat Shurmur, understanding that he couldn’t design an offense for Sam Bradford and a beleaguered offensive line that featured deep shots, sped up the time to throw and shortened the throwing depth.

Photo by Adam Bettcher/Getty Images

It was the correct decision, but it wasn’t enough. An offense with a stellar receiving corps couldn’t see targets downfield or put points up on the board. And so, they missed the playoffs.

One could abstractly argue that the 2016 Vikings are also a reason for optimism. The 2017 season was one of the most exciting seasons in Vikings history, which is a difficult bar to meet. That was characterized by one of the better defenses of the decade but also high-volatility passing that took better advantage of the receiving corps.

While finding a backup as talented as Case Keenum is pretty unlikely, it remains the case that the Vikings entered the season having replaced neither their starting quarterback (on purpose, anyway) nor their offensive coordinator.

The 2017 season was itself unsustainable, of course, which is what motivated the Vikings to let Keenum walk in free agency in favor of Kirk Cousins. So perhaps we shouldn’t put too much stock in something like that.

Their 15-10 win against the Miami Dolphins forces the comparison.

Despite an all-world performance from the special teams unit, the Vikings immediately gifted the Dolphins defense their first forced first-half punt of the season courtesy of their first sack of the season.

There’s something a little dispiriting about seeing the Vikings offense struggle as the commentators cannot stop talking about the Dolphins like they are a prodigious child still learning how to read.

Kevin Kugler: “This Dolphins defense, we saw it on this opening drive, the signs of improvement are there for this young group.”

Daryl Johnston: “They’ve taken strides. We’ve talked about small victories. The run defense has gotten better from week to week. They’ve gotten a little bit of pressure on the quarterback, but they hadn’t gotten that sack until today on that opening play. So, strides that are there, but still a long way to go for this group.”

The commentators weren’t wrong to talk about the Dolphins like this. In addition to being the youngest team in the NFL, they entered the game ranked 30th in EPA per play allowed and 32nd in points per drive allowed.

The sack absence was not an extreme statistical quirk; the Dolphins entered the game dead last in pressure rate. They are, by all accounts, a truly abysmal defense.

Historic Levels of Failing Success

If the 2016 Vikings were a mediocre offense, the 2026 offense is putrid. Over the last three games, they’ve scored one offensive touchdown, supplementing that with 11 field goals and a special teams score.

Twitter tweet

It’s not as if the offense is doing a lot of work to help set up these field goals, either. When evaluating field goals by likelihood (as a function of distance), we can see how many field goals an average team would score from the kicking distance Reichard has had to work with. That number is 9.9 over the season. That means Reichard has made 2.1 kicks over that.

When accounting for the lost expected point value of field position due to misses, Reichard ranks second in the league in field goal points over expected with +7.13, just behind the Colts’ Spencer Shrader’s +8.99.

The Vikings offense has benefited from the seventh-best average starting field position, but their touchdown rate on drives (14.3 percent) is the third-worst in the league. On the other hand, they rank first in percentage of drives ending in a field goal (28.6 percent).

They don’t get in the red zone, either. Despite that seventh-best starting field position, they have a drive enter the red zone just 19.0 percent of the time — second-worst in the league, just ahead of the Falcons.

Because they avoid turnovers (something they share with the 2016 team), they end up in an unusual position. They lead the league in drives ending in a kick.

For a team that has playoff aspirations, anything less than vorpally slicing through the Dolphins defense is capitulation. It might feel unfair to place playoff aspirations on them when they were generally projected to finish last in the division, but it’s the direct remit from the ownership — every year has playoff expectations, which informs their roster-building decisions.

If the team did not expect to compete, they would not have signed Kyler Murray or invested in aged veterans like Jamal Adams, Harrison Smith, Brian O’Neill or Aaron Jones.

A few weeks ago, viewers were treated to a graphic pointing out that Kevin O’Connell is the only coach in history to win four consecutive games with four different starting quarterbacks.

Twitter tweet

There is something truly skilled in being able to pilot that kind of ship, even with the benefit of a historically great defensive coordinator but it’s also the case that the offense, with the situation mostly ideal, can’t score. And he’s an offensive head coach with offensive playcalling duties, and his quarterback expertise is so well-regarded that he directly influences quarterback decision-making.

It is reasonable to take credit away from O’Connell when it comes to defensive performance and lay heavier blame for what happens on offense. While O’Connell deserves credit for jettisoning former defensive coordinator Ed Donatell after his first year as head coach to bring in Brian Flores, there’s only so much credit one can give management for identifying talent.

The four-win performance to start the season doesn’t tell us that the Vikings are a good team. It buys them time to get there without risking playoff position, which isn’t the worst thing in the world.

The gap is enormous, however. The difference in the Vikings’ offensive and defensive performance over four games is the 17th-largest difference in points per drive through four games out of the 457 team-seasons we have data for going back to 1999. Finishing in the fourth percentile of all teams in terms of how drastically different the units perform is a problem.

If they want to avoid another historic late-season collapse, they need to fix this offense.

Drives that end in a kneeldown are excluded; if Hockenson had scored at the end of the Dolphins game, this would be 7/45 (15.5%, still the among lowest in this cohort of 25 4-0 teams). The full-season chart for touchdown finishers was sent to email readers by accident. To view that chart, click here.

Touchdown rate is admittedly a volatile measure, and it runs downstream of an extremely volatile measure, red zone conversion rate. Generally speaking, touchdown rate inside the red zone means virtually nothing compared to the ability to consistently enter the red zone.

But as mentioned above, the Vikings have an abysmal red zone entry rate.

There are some statistical signs of life; the Vikings offense performs better in EPA/play than in points scored and does slightly better when accounting for opponent, despite how weak the Dolphins have been. This suggests that the Vikings can move the ball but stall out before hitting the red zone.

We also know the offense has been missing its biggest star for long stretches. The Vikings expect Justin Jefferson back soon.

This isn’t unmitigated confidence, however. The injuries to Donovan Jackson (season-ending, per latest reporting) and Christian Darrisaw could crater any incremental gains made from operational improvements and could undercut what Jefferson brings to the offense.

And that’s nothing to say of the fact that the offense has been smoother with Wentz in than Murray. Neither has performed well, but when Murray has been on the field, the offense has run at -0.15 EPA per play, while Wentz has overseen an offense generating a near-NFL-average -0.01 EPA per play.

Opponent adjustments widen the gap; the Murray-led offense has performed as if it was operating at -0.28 EPA per play against an average defense, while the Wentz offense operates with just a minor decrease to -0.03 EPA per play.

Much of this is in big negative plays; the Vikings offense has had more turnovers and taken more sacks with Murray on the field. The success rates between the two quarterbacks are virtually identical and don’t change much with opponent adjustment. Success rate may signal more than raw EPA, so we could see stability here, especially as we dig deeper into why failures might have happened.

Given the results of the last several seasons, I think it’s fairer to assume that Murray will improve and has a higher ceiling than Wentz. But the fact that Wentz has performed better than Murray thus far shouldn’t be ignored.

Whatever the ultimate solution is here, the Vikings need to maximize it. All of these charts and words say one thing: if they don’t fix it, it’s not going to fucking happen.

Let’s talk about the game.

The Vikings Offense: Enough, But Not Enough Enough

The early game was a disaster for Minnesota. Earning just 5.89 yards per attempt, Murray took three sacks, dropping net passing yardage from 112 to 89 and to 4.05 per dropback.

Pressure played a partial role; a high pressure rate of 40.9 percent can be difficult to overcome. It won’t be if the player passes for under a 60 percent completion rate on an average depth of target of 4.8 yards downfield.

The biggest culprit was Joe Huber, who replaced Donovan Jackson after Jackson was injured early. Huber took on quick pressures, and though he himself didn’t lose a specific rusher to create a sack, his inattention forced Murray off his spot and into other rushers.

Another culprit was the playcalling; the Vikings kept countering the Miami pass-rush — which rarely sent more than four rushers — by keeping extra players in to block. This seemed to be a response to early pressure, but it made the problem worse, not better.

With eligible pass-catchers stuck to the formation, Murray didn’t have outlets to throw to very often when pressure arrived. This might be OK if the players kept in pass protection could block, but T.J. Hockenson struggled as a pass protector. So did Max Bredeson, Deejay Dallas and Aaron Jones.

Because a burden had been placed on those receivers to get open at a higher frequency than they typically do, but they couldn’t manage it. Some of it was playcalling — the wrong play for the coverage the defense called —, but some of it was on the receiving unit, especially Jordan Addison.

None of this means Murray is free from sin. He was inaccurate on the throws he attempted and missed opportunities for matchups when they did appear, keeping his eyes locked on the primary progression in the play instead of alerting to one-on-one matchups and big-play opportunities.

All of this set up a much more manageable second half, where the Vikings moved the ball better. The touchdown rate element is complicated by the fact that the Vikings schemed up and threw a touchdown-worthy pass, completed to the intended receiver on the last non-kneeldown play.

In the second half, Murray completed 16 of 18 passes for 135 yards, 7.5 yards per attempt. He took one sack for 11 yards, for an adjusted net of 6.53 yards per dropback. His depth of target didn’t change, but that’s much less of an issue with a very high completion rate.

That was despite a higher pressure rate — an artifact of some uncharacteristic Brian O’Neill mistakes and another offensive line injury, with Darrisaw out for multiple drives after two separate neck or head injuries in the game. Ryan Van Demark replaced him

Van Demark held on; he didn’t perform outstandingly well but did better than most backups.

Either way, the offensive design and Murray succeeded in the second half in ways they couldn’t in the first. The completions weren’t quick — Murray went through his progressions before hitting checkdowns — but they were appropriate responses to pressure and a lack of deep threats.

This methodical sort of approach is what the offense needs; while the Vikings under O’Connell have traditionally been big-game hunters, looking for deep shots downfield and holding on to the ball, it’s always been the case that the more successful versions of the offense have deployed an outlet when the deep pass isn’t available.

T.J. Hockenson excelled as both a primary receiving threat and an outlet option. Hockenson not only found space and made himself available as a receiver, but won four of his four contested targets and reminded Vikings fans of the player they traded for years ago.

Murray looked better at the end of the game than he had in any other half he’s had with the Vikings and better than Wentz looked in any of his outings. Hopefully, that continues.

Historically, the offenses that improved most dramatically after a difficult start have done so because of a quarterback change. The three offenses that finished their seasons with above-average in EPA per play all changed QBs — Vinny Testaverde to Chad Pennington, Jake Browning to Joe Burrow, and Gus Frerotte/Akili Smith to Jon Kitna.

The two other major improvements came from offenses that switched from Josh Rosen to Ryan Fitzpatrick in 2019 for the Miami Dolphins and from Jeff George to Tony Banks in 2001 for the Washington Commanders.

Notably, the 2019 Dolphins started with Fitzpatrick, benched him for Rosen, then reinstated Fitzpatrick. That may not be the best example.

Either way, this has traditionally been the path to get out of the dirt for bad offenses. The Vikings probably won’t do it and likely won’t see much benefit from switching, but this emphasizes the importance of quarterback choice in this process.

The Vikings Defense: A Whirling Dervish of Success

The defense was astounding and remains so after accounting for opponent strength. While a team as bad as the Dolphins playing up to their “average” performance might be considered a below-average showing by the defense, the offense put them in a difficult position at times.

Miami went three-and-out on 44.4 percent of their drives and scored just 1.11 points per drive. The Vikings defense was once again saved from an explosive touchdown via penalty — which would affect volatile measures like points per drive. But in success rate, which discounts explosives and changes only slightly due to penalty luck, the Dolphins were held to just 35.1 percent.

To put into context how bad a 35.1 percent success rate is, it’s the success rate of the Vikings offense this year. This year, the two worst offenses in success rate are the Vikings and Dolphins. When you exclude those two, success rate ranges from 54.5 percent (San Francisco) to 37.3 percent (Philadelphia).

They did this through their passing-game effectiveness; they pressured Malik Willis on 60 percent of his dropbacks, blitzing him at an 80 percent rate. Willis posted a 4th-percentile EPA per dropback of -0.56. Accurate on just 52.9 percent of throws, Willis could not find consistency, and the explosives weren’t there, even after accounting for the one taken away.

Dallas Turner helped engineer this win, generating four pressures (per both PFF and Next Gen Stats) and leading the pressure leaderboard or tying for second, depending on the charting organization.

Turner did not benefit from as many reps against tight ends and air, having to work his way through offensive tackles in order to make his case as one of the better defenders in the NFL. Against an offensive lineman one-on-one on a standard dropback (excluding screens, boots, etc.), Turner managed a pass-rush win rate of 33.3 percent, an 88th percentile outcome consistent with high-level edge rusher play.

His overall pass-rush win rate — which still excludes unblocked reps — was 35.7 percent, a 99^th percentile outcome.

How Brian Flores is Maximizing Dallas Turner

Discussion

Wide Left • Matt Fries

He needs to be more consistent as a tackler, and he was part of the reason that Ollie Gordon II’s stat line looks so obscene. The 9 rushes for 100 yards (11.1 YPC) were built on three explosives; essentially, when Gordon had a success, it was huge, but he did not grind out consistent gains.

Eric Wilson had an outstanding performance; he produced three stops and earned a pass-rush win on a blitz that helped enable a quarterback hit. He was effective in coverage and seemed to be everywhere. Andrew Van Ginkel and Kyle Van Noy supplemented that with strong edge play; they earned a combined five pressures, two tackles-for-loss, and three stops.

The stellar special teams performances help, too — the Vikings have the second-best starting field position following kickoffs and, as isolated above, have the second-best performance in field goal points added over replacement.

Their punting, inhibited by a two-week injury to Brett Thorson, is below league average. But their punt returns have been excellent. They’re the only team with a punt return touchdown thus far and rank first in punt return average. Add in one of just seven kick blocks in the NFL, and it’s clear the Vikings special teams unit is a difference-maker.

The Vikings are number one defensively in the NFL in EPA per play allowed, points per game allowed, points per drive allowed, touchdown rate allowed on drives, drive success rate (first downs and touchdowns per down series) allowed, third down conversion rate allowed, and virtually any other defensive statistic one wants to use.

Look at this incredible gap between the Vikings and the Rams/Seahawks/Raiders on defense.

We’re seeing a stellar defensive performance architected as one of the most interesting defenses in NFL history. It would be a shame to waste it.

Photo by Jerry Holt/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images

Through three weeks, Minnesota Vikings’ edge rusher Dallas Turner leads the NFL in pressures. This is true across stat platforms: PFF has him first with 24 pressures, NFL Pro (via NextGenStats) has him first with 25, Pro-Football-Reference (via Sportradar) has him first with 19, and SumerSports also has him tied for first with Gregory Rousseau at 25. So far, Turner has converted those pressures into 3.5 sacks, which is t-4th in the NFL.

The 2026 season has been a breakout for third-year Turner, whom the team put its faith in after trading Jonathan Greenard to the Philadelphia Eagles this past offseason. Despite the high pressure numbers, there’s been a lot of discourse about whether or not Turner is actually playing that well. This probably started with Turner’s week 2 PFF grade, which was abnormally low for someone with his 11 total pressures and 2 sacks.

You can find discussion of the fraught nature of individual game PFF grades elsewhere on this website, but the discrepancy was large enough that PFF alumni Steve Palazzolo and Sam Monson re-graded the game on their show using their experience with that grading system.

Trench Warfare’s Brandon Thorn and Audibles and Analytics’ Jon Ledyard, both of whom I really respect as evaluators of trench play (author’s note: notably, Arif also had Jon on Norse Code to preview the Bucs’ game, although I would argue Arif usually does not respect the people he podcasts with), also jumped into the conversation on Twitter.

The conversations above point towards the realities of the situation. So far this season, Turner has consistently racked up the pressures, but he’s had many opportunities where he’s either unblocked or matched up against a lesser blocker, like a tight end, compared to some other players at the position who are constantly facing opposing offensive tackles. 

However, as @Krauserrific points out in the second conversation, Turner gets so many of those pressures because he’s consistently being put in those situations.

The Vikings’ defensive architect, Brian Flores, is blitzing at unprecedented levels, and that has naturally led to easier matchups for Turner. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t had chances for “High Quality” pressures, but he most likely has fewer opportunities than other edge rushers because of the defense he’s playing in.

Given that, it’s worth investigating both how Turner is earning his pressures and how he’s performing against OTs, the type of competition most other edge rushers often face. I studied each of Turner’s pass-rush attempts, charting the pressures and some other wins. Let’s dive into how he’s getting it done.

Table of Contents

The Film and Data

I categorized Turner’s 25 pressures from NFLPro. 

Unblocked

He has 8 unblocked pressures. In this sample, I included plays where he was virtually unblocked because of offensive mistakes, as well as the half sack Turner got against the Bucs, where he actually had a coverage assignment but chased down Baker on a scramble. 

The below is an example of a schemed-up, unblocked pressure that anyone could have gotten, as the Bears left him unblocked. This kind of pressure should be credited to Brian Flores, who created a difficult protection situation for the Bears. 

They chose to half slide to the left to pick up the three rushers to that side, leaving the back side guard and tackle to block four potential rushers in Blake Cashman, Eric Wilson, Turner, and Harrison Smith. Cashman and Wilson are the most dangerous, since they’re closest to QB Caleb Williams, and when they step forward, both blockers go to meet them. Caleb has two potential hot options on the play if there is an unblocked rusher, but Cashman is executing a “tag” rush that deters the underneath route by TE Colston Loveland and Smith dropping into coverage takes away WR Rome Odunze.

Turner has certainly benefited from the Vikings’ pressure design; not all of the unblocked pressures were freebies. In particular, Turner’s athleticism has shone through, and he’s avoided blocks where other, slower players might get caught. 

On the play below, he has a natural advantage: he’s aligned very wide, and the Packers are, for some reason, asking their RG to expand all the way out to block him. This is a tough assignment, but Turner also has to navigate significant traffic to get there. Turner works through and fluidly chases Love to force him to dirt the ball.

Turner’s forced fumble in the Packers’ game is a similar example. On this play, the TE screws up and impacts right tackle Zach Bako-Bewele, so both are late to their spot, and neither can touch Turner, who turns the corner and sacks Love. But Turner was so fast off the ball that he was 4 yards into the backfield by the time Love faked a handoff.

Turner is also frequently succeeding on stunts. On the play below, he gets inside and hits Love very quickly, before running back Chris Brooks can recover. Flores deserves some credit here, as he forced the protection to leave and the RB to pair up with an LT to pick up a stunt, which is a very difficult task. Brooks overcommits and does a poor job picking up the stunt, but Turner was also fast enough to make an impact.

Certainly, Turner is benefiting from unblocked pressures. But his athleticism also lets him take full advantage of them. Why not both?

Lesser Blockers

After the unblocked pressures, 6 pressures came while Turner was rushing against TEs. 

On those reps, Turner consistently won with a bull rush. Baker Mayfield ducked out of a sack on this play, but Turner walked TE Payne Durham right into his lap.

Turner was able to consistently beat whichever TE he went up against, which included some of the league’s better blockers at the position, Tucker Kraft and Cole Kmet. Here he is winning inside against Kraft:

And here he bull rushes straight through Kmet:

The play below is another situation where Turner’s athleticism comes in handy. The Bears are running a pretty typical play-action protection, with Kmet trying to cut Turner and Colston Loveland trying to block him on split-zone action. Turner completely sidesteps Kmet’s block, then quickly disengages from Loveland to sack Caleb. Jalen Redmond had a big hand in the sack, forcing Williams to step up in the pocket, but Turner was only in position to make the sack because he sidestepped Kmet.

Certainly, Brian Flores plays a role in creating these advantageous matchups. This is evident in the play below, Turner’s walkoff sack against the Bears. On the play, the Vikings have four potential rushers on the left side of the offensive line, with Turner furthest outside:

This leaves the Bears between a rock and a hard place, protection-wise. They could ask left tackle Braxton Jones to get all the way out to Turner, but if they do, they risk what happened to the Packers earlier — if Jones can’t get out there in time, Turner would be virtually unblocked. So they let Loveland match up one-on-one with Turner, and that also proves to be a big mistake. Turner bull rushes right through Loveland and consumes QB Tyson Bagent to end the game.

The threat of additional pass rushers is constant for offenses when facing the Vikings, and it forces difficult offensive protection problems like the one above.

Obviously, the Vikings consistently play with linebackers mugged up on the line of scrimmage, but even when they want Cashman and Wilson to cover, they’ll have them act like threats pre-snap. We’ll come back to this play for pass-rush reasons, but for now, just watch Cashman and Wilson pre-snap. 

They start at the line of scrimmage, then drop back to more depth. This forces the Packers to adjust their protection (you can see the LT and LG raise their hands to signal 5-0 protection) and gets Turner a one-on-one matchup. If you count CB Byron Murphy, angled inside and threatening a corner (“cat”) blitz because of the condensed formation, the Vikings have 8 pass-rush threats.

Contrast that look with the Mike Zimmer-era Vikings. Zimmer was a fantastic defensive coach in his own right and pioneered many of the mug looks the Vikings use, but it wasn’t his base defense, which looked more like the one below. On the play below, the Vikings realistically have 4 pass rush threats, maybe 5 if you include LB Eric Kendricks. Wilson is far enough off the ball that he doesn’t impact the protection. The Cowboys can half slide to Kendricks and feel protected easily.

In going through the tape, I counted how many potential rush threats the Vikings had on each pressure. They never had fewer than 5 on a play and averaged 6.5 pass-rush threats, including 14 plays where they threatened 7 or 8 rushers.

That’s really helping Turner get advantageous matchups, but he’s also making the most of them. Turner consistently won his matchups against lesser blockers. I have 17 reps charted where a TE or RB was his primary blocker. In my opinion, he won 11 of those matchups.

The Duds

Sometimes, a pressure gets charted by a different service that doesn’t seem like a pressure to me. There were 7 plays where Turner was credited with a pressure that I don’t think were really pass rush wins.

Noooo! Stop choosing paper! Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Can anyone be good at Rock-Paper-Scissors?

That sounds like a nonsensical question. Assuming random choices, you have a 33% chance of picking the winning option, a 33% chance of picking the losing option, and a 33% chance of picking the tying option. One choice is no better than another.

But choices in Rock-Paper-Scissors are not random. Humans cannot simulate randomness — no matter how hard we try, biases will show.

As the famous legend goes, a professor divided his class into two groups. One was instructed to flip a coin over and over and record the results. The other group was to write down fake results meant to trick the professor into thinking they were real. 

The professor could easily spot the fakes, since most of them lacked major streaks. The students’ desire not to show a tendency was itself a tendency. True randomness is messier, and harder to believe.

With that psychology in mind, think about Rock-Paper-Scissors. Imagine we will play 100 games in a row. What would your strategy be? Would you play rock a few times in a row, then switch to scissors if your opponent thinks they’ve caught on? Would you alternate? Try to be random?

In the early 2010s, a Chinese research team studied several large-scale Rock-Paper-Scissors tournaments and found a pattern: winners tended to repeat their throws, and losers tended to change them up.

Subverting that tendency turned out to be a good strategy. Say you throw paper and your opponent throws scissors. They’re likely to throw scissors again, so throw rock. If you throw scissors and your opponent throws paper, anticipate that they’ll switch to rock next time, and throw paper yourself.

It’s explained well in this video by Numberphile: 

This strategy assumes a large pool of players will behave with average human tendencies, with no organized strategy of their own. What if you showed everyone that Numberphile video, then had them all play? How would your strategy change? 

Would you stick to the instructions in the video, or do what beats a player who is doing so? If you lose to scissors with paper, would you throw rock according to the strategy? Would your opponent expect that and throw paper themselves? Would you anticipate that, and throw scissors?

You could bury yourself in iterative layers of reverse psychology forever. Ultimately, the context matters. A Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament among friends you know well will play out differently than a tournament among strangers, which will play out differently than a game against a true random number generator.

Take that same idea and add the layered complexity of NFL football, and you can see how Ben Johnson lost himself in that same sauce. Imagine yourself as a play caller, and that Rock-Paper-Scissors psychology can quickly take over. Your team has plays that beats theirs, but they bring plays that beat your plays that beat their plays, and so on. 

It comes down to sequencing, finding tendencies, and hoping you’re in the right play at the right time. Even optimal strategies rely on luck. The best thing you can hope for is an edge on more plays than not.

So if you were Kevin O’Connell, constructing a gameplan for your Week 3 opponent, Todd Bowles and his Tampa Bay Buccaneers, how would you approach that proverbial game of Rock-Paper-Scissors?

Further, how did that gameplan go so wrong?

Dispiriting data provided by RBSDM.com

Table of Contents

Kevin O’Connell’s Gameplan

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers seem like an easy enough team to prepare for. They entered their Week 3 tilt with the Vikings as one of the most Cover 3 and Cover 1 heavy teams in the league. 

That is to say, the Vikings could expect man or zone interchangeably, but they will see a lot of deep safeties in the middle and corners playing deep outside. The other reliable thing about head coach Todd Bowles is his own tendency to blitz.

There is, of course, the Buccaneers’ run defense to contend with as well, but for the sake of this piece, let’s focus on the passing defense. To oversimplify, there are two questions to contend with: How do we beat Cover 1/Cover 3, and how do we contend with the blitz?

The Vikings’ plan hinged on seeing a lot of Cover 3, and they were right to anticipate that. The Bucs ultimately ran Cover 3 54.5% of the time, 7th most of any game this season.

The Vikings were right to attack Cover 3. Take Minnesota’s very first play of the game: play-action Dagger. They run Dagger a little differently than Shanahan/McVay systems typically prefer.

Source: 2022 Miami Dolphins Playbook

That “Thru” route is a sight adjust: a route that changes based on what the wide receiver sees. The quarterback has to be on the same page.

To run a Thru, the receiver has to read the safeties. If the middle of the field is open, split it. If it’s closed, cut the route off underneath that safety, drawing him out of the window for the “Dover” route, which is functionally a dig.

Jordan Addison runs the Thru right at the safety, forcing him to deepen. That leaves Justin Jefferson one-on-one with the corner, playing with outside leverage against an in-breaking route.

Paper, meet scissors.

Problem is, this is a long-developing route concept. There’s a big chunk of yardage as a reward if you block it up, but that carries risk. What if Todd Bowles blitzes, as he is wont to do? Just in case, the Vikings add extra blockers. Bowles can blitz all he wants — the Vikings will have the numbers.

This first play reveals their strategy. Occupy the middle safety, get Justin Jefferson one-on-one with a cornerback on the outside, probably Jacob Parrish or Zyon McCollum, and hope their star receiver can win that matchup. Everyone else will block up the blitzes. 

Without the benefit of hindsight, it’s perfectly sensible. Blunt the blitzes and try to isolate your star receiver on their average-at-best cornerback group. But with the benefit of hindsight…

It Didn’t Go Great

On the first possession, Justin Jefferson went down with a mild ankle sprain. He’d miss the rest of the game. 

Pic related

That left the Vikings in a bind. Now Jordan Addison is far and away the biggest threat. Jauan Jennings and Tai Felton will have to win some of those one-on-ones to the outside while Addison gets a ton of attention from the rest of the defense.

Those one-on-ones to Addison can work, at least. 

Twitter tweet

A fall like this is astounding — more than can be chalked up to any of the single teams involved. It can’t be understood as only a reflection on the woes of the Panthers (who won handily in Week 2) or the might of the Vikings, and it doesn’t tell a believable story about the Bears, either. 

Nobody gets 56 points worse in six days. It’s a myriad of factors, including the weather, health, luck, and yes, some real signal.

One of those factors is a pillar of the Bears’ offense: Caleb Williams scramble drills. It’s the central challenge to facing the Bears. How will you keep Williams from killing you on the ground, or with eye-popping heroics outside the pocket?

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In Week 1, Williams played outside the pocket 17 times. On those plays, between passing and true scrambling, he amassed 239 of his 334 yards from scrimmage, nine first downs and three touchdowns: one in the air and two on the ground.

Week 2 featured 12 such plays, and the Vikings limited Williams to 62 total yards from scrimmage, just three first downs, and no scores of any kind.

Williams left the game late with a hamstring injury, but up until that point was stifled. In fact, this was arguably Ben Johnson’s worst game as a play caller. 

How the hell did they do that? To stifle the king of scrambling, specifically on the scrambles? To undo the league’s latest offensive whiz kid? The Vikings had to succeed with a combination of effective planning and tight execution.

Table of Contents

The Problem

First, let’s get a sense for how Caleb Williams can kill you on the scramble drill, and the basic tenets of QB containment.

Keeping it as simple as possible: with a four-man rush against a five-man protection, the rules play out similarly to run fits. There are six possible escape lanes, and four guys to cover them. 

So you have to have some players responsible for two lanes, meaning they don’t have the luxury of a true pass rush. That can affect that player’s potential to produce, but as long as we’re not valuing the stat sheet over the result, that shouldn’t be a problem.

That’s still a plenty difficult job, and if you mess it up, the consequences can be dire. Here, Derrick Brown runs a stunt and then is responsible for both the A-gap and B-gap in front of him. 

Despite overpowering Joe Thuney, he drives just a bit too far upfield, and Williams can find space.

Lethal.

It doesn’t help that the Panthers were in man coverage on this play, meaning many defenders take their eyes off the quarterback. By the time everyone knows what’s going on, it’s too late.

Here’s one from last year’s season opener on Monday Night Football. The Vikings let Williams out and he finds Rome Odunze on the sideline.

Andrew Van Ginkel doesn’t prevent Williams from rolling to his right and initiating scramble rules. He is responsible for the C gap, but doesn’t free his upfield shoulder to dissuade that kind of rollout.

As soon as Williams breaks the pocket, the play transforms. Mostly universal scramble rules dictate how. Everyone works with Williams to the right. Odunze works back toward the quarterback, Olamide Zaccheus works deep, and Williams provides his own shallow running threat.

Now this needs to be defended like a flood concept. There is a high threat, a medium one, and a low one. Every route is now working toward the sideline, so the coverage needs to defend all three levels on that sideline while safely ignoring the other side of the field.

So when Theo Jackson doesn’t work back toward Williams along with Odunze, there’s an opening. Rome manages to cut under Jackson ever so slightly. It’s a slim margin, but Williams can make that throw. It doesn’t take much, and there are too many options. 

Things could have been even worse if Williams had time to throw to D.J. Moore, who was streaking open around the 25-yard line and had room to run after the catch. But considering he started way too far on the other side of the field, he’s not an option. Only receivers on the scramble side are available.

With Williams being as athletic as he is, containing him is a difficult job. Any play can become flood to either side at any time. You also don’t want to go too conservative and hem Williams in just to let him hang out in a clean pocket. 

So the pass rush plan needs to pressure Williams without letting him run free, while simultaneously setting up to be able to defend flood and still have enough coverage resources available for standard dropback passing. And that’s without even mentioning Chicago’s run game or play action strategy.

Sound easy enough?

The Plan

The Vikings’ base coverage plan actually plays pretty comfortably into this. They prefer split-field zone coverage, whether they are blitzing or not. In fact, the Vikings have called cover 1 just three times so far in 2026, per PFF.

They also still shy away from Cover 3:

Week 2 MNF excluded.

Instead, they prefer a combination of Cover 2, Cover 4, and Cover 6. These zones keep players’ eyes upfield, meaning they can identify when Williams has initiated a scramble and adjust accordingly.

The pass rush plan has to combine contain principles with an actual… plan to rush the passer. The Vikings chose to lean on Dallas Turner and try to generate mismatches. They’ve done a remarkably good job, with Turner generating 20 pressures and only three requiring him to beat a tackle.

NFL pass protection plans love to slide half the line to one side and create a wall. Slide three, four, or even five (pictured below) blockers to one side and wall it off, then man up everyone else. I went into depth on this in a video a couple of years ago. 

A man-to-man side for Brian O’Neill, and a wall for everyone else.

That wall is pretty hard to scramble through. Imagining if Carson Wentz had legs, his scramble options would be to bail straight out of the pocket to either side, or take the rushing lane up the B-gap between Will Fries and Brian O’Neill.

This is what Flores needs to control. If he can force Chicago to set the wall the way he wants, he can isolate matchups, predict the escape hatches, and control the quarterback. Moreover, blockers line up in the same order all the time. The tight end is always on the end. The center is always next to the guard. 

These rules are predictable enough to abuse. That’s where Flores makes his money.

The best example may be the last play of the game. The Bears have seven in protection, and the Vikings are rushing five. The Bears really don’t need to ask Colston Loveland to block Dallas Turner on the last play of the game.

But the Vikings’ front overloads the right side, forcing Chicago to fan out to pick it up. That gives right guard Jonah Jackson nothing to do, and leaves Loveland on an island with Turner.

Specifically, Jalen Redmond’s alignment creates the problem. He’s to the right of center Garrett Bradbury, and the gap to his left is totally uncovered. Kyle Van Noy and Dallas Turner are the other designated “bigs” as primarily pass rushers, so the remaining blockers prioritize them. That gives the Bears a double team on Redmond, a tackle on Van Noy, and Loveland on Dallas Turner.

De’Andre Swift could help, but since Blake Cashman is also blitzing, Turner is isolated. Now he just needs to win.

Van Noy and Redmond execute a stunt for good measure, but the Bears’ slide picks it up. It’s a moot point. Dallas Turner gets the sack. Ballgame.

So that’s a nice, clean example of the way the right front can manipulate protection rules. But you may notice: that is not Caleb Williams. How does this change when the quarterback is a much more significant threat?

The key idea isn’t isolating matchups for Dallas Turner, though that has happened plenty. It’s forcing the line to slide the way the Vikings want. That will cut off a specific escape lane, allowing the Vikings, not Caleb Williams, to dictate the terms of a scramble drill.

On the following play, everyone slants to the right. Redmond crosses the right guard’s face. Levi Drake Rodriguez fights across the left guard. Kyle Van Noy rushes upfield against the left tackle, and all this forces a four-man slide to our right. Darnell Wright takes Dallas Turner, and Eric Wilson blitzes in the split between them.

The Bears’ O-line slides to their left, creating a wall to that side that Williams couldn’t run through if he tried. As long as Van Noy cuts Williams off upfield, that won’t be a valid scrambling option.

Can’t go there!

Williams tries to scramble, but he can only go the way that puts him face to face with Eric Wilson, who beats Swift for what ultimately goes down as intentional grounding.

Also look how Dallas Turner keeps his hips square to the line of scrimmage — if Williams did get outside Wilson, Turner could trigger and chase him down, but he’d also be able to close down space if Williams tried to cut up the B gap.

This was the general shape of the pass rush plan. Slant to one side, and whoever is on the other side (usually Turner) stays conservative, ready for Williams to flush out. 

Maybe the most distinct example of this strategy comes from Harrison Smith, who ends up unblocked in this contain role. 

Instead of firing out of a cannon and getting juked, Smith breaks down like a punt gunner and keeps Williams in front of him.

Now, the question becomes: how do we decide which side to slant toward? There are two intuitive options: the side with more space (the field), or the side with more passing threats (the strength). Often, these are the same. After all, you want more receivers where they have space to run.

Another way to think of it is to slant the front to the side where a scramble drill would do more damage. Here, both the field and the strength are to the offense’s right.

It’s 3rd and long — a time where the Bears’ only reliable way out is the scramble drill. It’s imperative to take that away. The Vikings slant their front to the field, and to the trips side.

Again, Dallas Turner is the one on an island here. He has to beat the tight end’s block and close down the ever-elusive Williams.

Turner can’t bring Williams down, but he can’t take advantage of that space to his left because nobody is running a route on that side. Instead, he has to loop all the way back around, at which point a scramble for a few yards is the only reasonable option.

The important lesson in this play is that the most difficult contain job (Turner’s) is also the lowest leverage one. If Williams could scramble easily to his right, he could work his magic. But there’s no prize to his left, meaning Williams forces the much slower scramble right.

The Bears were happy to cut the field in half to make for juicy scramble opportunities and stress the Vikings’ depleted coverages. But that meant only one side was viable. Cut that off, and the Bears flounder.

So that’s the plan. Be conservative when warranted, slant the front toward the juicier side of the field to scramble to, and push the pocket. But that plan only works on the whiteboard. The players still need to execute it.

The Execution

The Vikings consistently deployed this pass rush plan, slanting to the field side and tasking one player with contain to the boundary. 

Photo by Butch Dill/Getty Images

Every week this season, I’ll be breaking down the key performances from draftable prospects across the country. Here are my thoughts and takeaways from Week 3 tape study. I’ve grouped each player into tiers based on how I rated their performance.

First Week Notebook Here.

Second Week Notebook Here.

Table of Contents

This story contains significant video content. On mobile, this may cause some difficulty for users. If so, consider accessing the site via desktop.

Elite

The 2027 defensive line class got off to a slow start, with many of the top prospects, Will Echoles included, underwhelming in their first few weeks of action. But in Week 3, Echoles responded with one of the best single-game performances I’ve seen from a college defensive tackle and reasserted himself as the top player at his position. 

He was unblockable in both phases, recording seven pressures, three run stops, and a sack. Ole Miss identified LSU’s left guard as the weak link and attacked it repeatedly with their best player — Echoles lined up over the left guard on 37 of his 40 B-gap snaps and took full advantage of his one-on-one opportunities, racking up clean, decisive wins for the entire game. 

Echoles is proficient with a wide variety of moves, and he deployed all of them throughout the game to keep his opponent guessing. His wins were equally quick and dominant, whether he used a club-swim, one-hand swipe, two-hand swipe, or long-arm. His effectiveness as a pass rusher declined later in the game, and he looked a bit gassed in the fourth quarter. But I have no concerns about his conditioning, as he played more 50+ snap games (8) in 2025 than any defensive tackle selected in the 2026 Draft besides Landon Robinson (9). 

Echoles took over the game on third down, but also made a high impact in run support. He swam through a reckless Jordan Seaton down block for a TFL, and his quickness off the snap allowed him to defeat zone cutoffs and maintain gap leverage. Though he missed a couple of tackles, they were net-positive plays, as his pursuit funneled the ball carrier towards other defenders.

Great

Working primarily against left tackle PJ Williams, a top-80 player on the consensus board, Clev Lubin had by far his most productive game of the season. He recorded eight wins, six pressures, and two sacks, heating up significantly on the final drive to seal the game. Though he didn’t have any wins along the outside track, he dominated Williams with power and inside moves.

Lubin set up his moves masterfully in this game, using stutters, hesitations, and deceptive stems to influence his opponent’s set and create favorable rush angles. By aggressively threatening the outside track, he forced Williams to bail and prepare for a speed move. This exposed his frame and tilted his weight distribution, softening him up for a bull rush.

By getting off the ball at a more measured pace and taking a direct angle down the midline, he signaled to Williams that he was using power, forcing him to brace for impact and set his anchor. When a tackle plants his roots, he sacrifices most of his freedom of movement and redirection, leaving him vulnerable to inside moves. 

This restrained, nonchalant get-off lulled Williams to sleep and diminished his reactive athleticism. While Lubin was less impactful as a run defender, he didn’t have many negative plays, and he did a decent job setting the edge and preventing blockers from latching onto his frame.

A five-star recruit in 2024, Luke Reynolds began his career at Penn State, where he played two forgettable seasons with a heavy blocking workload and modest receiving production. But he’s broken out at Virginia Tech and is firmly in the running for TE3 in the 2027 class. 

He leads Power-4 tight ends in receptions (25), yards (270), and touchdowns (4) through the first three weeks, and he didn’t slow down at all in his first Big Ten game. Reynolds caught twelve passes for 106 yards and a touchdown in his matchup with Maryland, where his exceptional ball skills and YAC ability were on full display. 

Reynolds was given a lot of contested targets along the intermediate sideline and showed the focus and body control to make athletic mid-air adjustments, land in bounds, and secure the catch through contact. With so few targets in 2025, evaluating Reynolds’ ability at the catch point was nearly impossible. But I’m very encouraged by the hand strength, ball-tracking, spatial awareness, and coordination that he’s displayed up to this point.

The Virginia Tech tight end is elusive after the catch and does an excellent job setting up blocks and manipulating pursuit angles. Near the end of his 14-yard tunnel screen touchdown from Week 3, he gave a subtle fake inside, influencing the last defender to play the block with inside leverage and clearing a path to the end zone. He’s explosive off the line and has the burst to stack man coverage initially, but he lacks the top speed to pull away down the seam/sideline. 

Defenders are consistently able to run with him step-for-step on crossing routes. His average long speed might keep him out of the first round, but he’s absolutely a day two-caliber athlete. While he isn’t in the Jackson Hawes tier of blocking specialists, Reynolds is a capable and experienced inline blocker. 

Good

Devan Thompkins had another big game in Week 3, and as one of the most physically talented players in college football, I’d expect to start seeing his name in mock drafts if this production continues. Over the last two weeks, Thompkins has recorded nine pressures, three sacks, and eight stop tackles, splitting time evenly between 3-tech (41 snaps) and edge (41 snaps). 

Compared to Week 2, his motor and play speed were much more consistent snap-to-snap against Florida State. He dusted Xavier Chaplin (LT) with an inside spin and beat Chaplin and the right guard with a bull rush. He tends to raise his pad level when attempting cross-face moves, allowing blockers to latch onto his frame and tie him up. He eviscerates tight ends that try to block him one-on-one and did a decent job withstanding double teams in Week 3, though he needs to sink his hips lower and establish a more pronounced leverage advantage. His biggest issue in this game was getting pancaked (2X) or sealed (1X) by backside cutoffs.

Boubacar Traore is currently ranked 73rd on the consensus board, but I expect him to be at minimum a top-50 pick in April given his traits and high level of play early in the year. Traore finished this week’s game with seven pass rush wins, six pressures, and a strip-sack. He won with an even blend of speed and power, generating consistent displacement with his bull rush and clearing the outside track with a cross-chop or hook-rip. 

Near the end of the game, he won with his signature outside spin but couldn’t flip the edge tightly enough to finish the sack. He came free on a flush stunt and got an unblocked strip-sack. Then, he indirectly forced another turnover, bull-rushing the right tackle into the quarterback and forcing an errant throw, which Adon Shuler intercepted. He dented a puller and assisted the tackle, though his run defense tape was mostly uneventful this week.

Mario Craver is one of the most dynamic playmakers in college football and the Texas A&M offense’s lone redeeming quality. The Aggies ran their offense through Craver in Week 3, targeting him 18 times, the most for a receiver in a single game this year. He finished with only 119 receiving yards, primarily due to Marcel Reed’s abysmal ball placement and partially because of Craver’s lack of physicality at the catch point. In this game, he made a strong catch through contact over the deep middle but also left several contested catch opportunities on the field.

He’s an easy mover with instant acceleration off the line and elite burst out of breaks. His rare freedom of movement allows him to cut on a dime at acute angles and run complex routes with multiple breaks and tempo changes. His ability to fully commit to a route fake, make a severe cut in the opposite direction, and gain speed out of his transition makes for highly convincing blaze-outs and double moves.

Craver’s movement skills unlock every branch on the route tree and give play callers unique ways of getting him the ball. Craver is just as dynamic after the catch. He led Power-4 receivers with 9.7 yards after the catch per reception in 2025, often turning five-yard gains into explosive plays.

Despite being one of the most naturally talented separators in this class, I’m looking for him to develop into a more precise and efficient route runner in 2026, which will make him a more dependable target in a timing-based NFL offense.

Over the summer, I graded Jadan Baugh as the uncontested HB1 in the 2027 class. After two weeks of eviscerating FCS/G5 competition, he faced his first real defense in Week 3. 

He made Auburn look like Florida Atlantic. 

On 26 carries, Baugh forced thirteen missed tackles and recorded 172 yards and three touchdowns. He’s elusive and slippery in the open field, with nimble feet to avoid ankle tackles and fluid cuts/spins to shake defenders at the second level. He can plant his foot and decelerate on a dime, weaponizing his violent stop-start ability to punish reckless angles. 

His stiff-arm batters defenders in the alley and was particularly deadly in Week 3. As per usual, Baugh consistently found cutback lanes on stretch zone and gracefully maneuvered through traffic on power/counter. While Auburn did gift him several explosive plays because of poor gap integrity or being outnumbered pre-snap, this was still an outstanding performance on the ground. 

Usually a dependable receiving back, Baugh struggled in the passing game against Auburn, which reduces his game rating to ‘Good’. He dropped a screen and tipped it up to a defender, leading to an interception. He also missed an assignment in blitz pickup, resulting in a QB hit.

Trinidad Chambliss had an excellent Week 3 performance and is probably playing his way into the first round. He picked apart LSU's zone coverage from the pocket, made plays with his legs when necessary, and showed up in high-leverage moments. Even after watching 12-15 of his starts over the last two years, I still find myself surprised by his composure and anticipation over the middle at his size. 

He was late and behind on a backside dig in the first quarter, but hit several on time later in the game. His receivers heard footsteps and dropped a few catchable in-breakers. He got hit as he released the ball and threw an interception to the deep safety, and placed a swing pass behind Kewan Lacy, resulting in a 14-yard loss. Near the end of the game, he beat Ty Benefield to the edge for the go-ahead touchdown.

KJ Bolden will be in contention for being the top safety in the 2027 class. In his first Power-4 matchup, he played 39 snaps and recorded five tackles and a pass breakup. He blew up a shallow crosser for a short gain, then broke up a dig on the very next play. 

However, he took a bad downhill angle from centerfield and whiffed on the tackle, turning a chunk play into an explosive. He swarmed to the ball and fit the run with violence, which has been a consistent theme on Bolden’s tape since his freshman year.

Junior Sherrill is one of the more underrated receiver prospects in the 2027 class, and his first Power-4 matchup of the season did not disappoint. He caught six of his seven targets for 108 yards and two touchdowns. Sherrill’s double moves were lethal in this game, as he scored touchdowns on a sluggo (12 yards) and stop-and-go (43 yards). 

He also worked back for a jump ball and secured it through contact. However, he was unable to track the ball over his shoulder after stacking man coverage and missed an opportunity for another 40+ yard reception. He also dropped an easy underneath target in the red zone.

Above Average

Jacarrius Peak saw his first action since injuring his knee in February, and I was pleasantly surprised by his tape. He played 37 snaps, most of which were pass blocking, and didn’t have any trouble readjusting to the speed of the game. Charters like Pro Football Focus didn’t fault Peak with a pressure, but I would argue he allowed three or four. 

He has outstanding strike power and grip strength and played with more violence in pass protection than I saw on his 2025 tape. He consistently stymied his opponent with a firm punch, then worked to bury him in the grass. Peak’s anchor remains his biggest issue, however. He gradually cedes ground and allows power rushers to displace him or dent his edges. 

He struggles to completely stamp out speed-to-power, and oftentimes the best he can do is limit it to a slow burn. While Peak must fortify his anchor for the next level, he looked healthy against Mississippi State and showed the athletic tools that make him such an enticing prospect.

Vicari Swain is a young, talented press corner with top-50 upside. He played well in his first non-cupcake matchup, allowing just one catch for three yards on five targets — though his box score is slightly misleading, as a couple of his targets were open but uncatchable. Swain’s success is almost entirely dependent on whether he jams aggressively at the line of scrimmage. 

When he uses his hands proactively, he’s a suffocating presence in press, with good length and strike power to disrupt the timing of the release. He has the foot speed and hand-fighting skills to contain intricate releases without getting crossed up, along with the lateral quickness to cut off inside releases and get back in-phase with the route. 

When his receiver takes an outside release, he instinctively reroutes it to the sideline and makes that receiver ineligible. On his best play of the week, he blanketed a quick slant and raked the ball out with precise hands (first play of the cutup). 

However, he gets burned off the line of scrimmage consistently when he doesn’t jam, as he lacks elite recovery speed to make up ground. He can't afford to play soft-shoe press and try to win footraces vs. true deep threats. As the route develops, Swain has fluid hips to mirror sharp breaks and decelerate abruptly. He also plays with the physical edge of a safety in run support.

Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa played just 22 snaps against Michigan State, but this was our first real look at him in 2026. He quickly showed his ability to both shed and evade blocks. In the first quarter, he dodged the center in a phone booth and slipped into the A-gap, barely even making contact with the block. Then in the second quarter, he jolted the left guard with a ferocious punch and met the ball carrier at the line of scrimmage. 

However, he was partially responsible for the 15-yard touchdown run in the second quarter, as he got stuck to a block early and couldn't disengage. On his only significant coverage rep, he bit on play action and lost leverage vs. a crossing route, resulting in an 18-yard completion. He recorded two pressures, both of which came after demolishing Michigan State’s running backs in blitz pickup, though he missed an unblocked sack opportunity later in the game. 

Jordan Seaton’s tape was closer to ‘Good’ than ‘Above Average’, but he committed two false starts, which warrants a downgrade. In the first quarter, he was a bit too passive with his punch and got displaced by Kam Franklin’s long-arm, before eventually finding his anchor. Aside from that play, Seaton didn’t have any losses in pass protection. His explosive vertical sets effortlessly match speed up the arc, and his hand placement and timing were noticeably more precise than usual. 

He showed his elite fluidity on play #2, mirroring a euro-step inside, then urgently expanding & gaining depth to protect the corner. Seaton’s nuanced hand technique gives him an answer for every pass rush plan, and he’s started to anticipate moves from tape study and neutralize them proactively. When he expects a spin move, for example, he jabs the rusher’s inside shoulder to disrupt his transition. 

He’s still, however, a net-negative in the run game. He whiffed on a down block vs. Will Echoles and gave up a TFL. He consistently struggles to take proper angles and sustain blocks at the second level. He did spring an explosive play by cutting off a WLB blitz and torquing him out of the gap. His gallop technique annihilates the 2i/3-tech, but he needs to learn to climb from the combo to the second level with more control.

Average

Dallas Turner sealed the game with a sack. Photo by Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images

The Vikings repeated their absurd blitzing strategy against the Chicago Bears, authors of the highest-scoring game in the NFL this year. That team, which put 59 points on the Panthers in Week 1, was held to just three points against Minnesota.

This represents the largest drop in offensive points scored in consecutive weeks since 1973, when the Atlanta Falcons scored a franchise-record 62 points in their season opener against the New Orleans Saints before getting shut out by the Los Angeles Rams the next week.

The Bears posted their second-worst offensive performance by EPA per play in the Ben Johnson era and their single-worst performance by points scored. It is the only time the Ben Johnson Bears scored fewer than 16 points and the only time they hadn’t scored an offensive touchdown, the week after they scored eight.

Twitter tweet

The Vikings did it by blitzing the fuck out of the opposing quarterback. Again.

Bears quarterbacks were hit ten times and took four sacks. When they were able to get rid of the ball, their passes were defensed seven times, including one pick. They were under duress on 49.6 percent of snaps, according to Pro Football Focus and they produced a success rate just north of one-in-four.

There are important caveats to this, of course. One does not produce a historic defensive performance on pure skill alone. The weather played a big role, as did the injury Caleb Williams suffered late in the game, one that prevented a run into the end zone.

But even with all of those caveats, it was a dominant performance. In rainier conditions against a top-flight defense, the 2022 Chicago Bears and Justin Fields penguin-slid their way into 19 points, after all.

Still, the Vikings piloted a win with their backup quarterback using a renewed defense that looks like it could be a problem for anybody. And it felt like a Madden player took the controller and usered all eleven players on defense and sent them running at the QB, mashing the hit stick.

Depending on who does the charting, the Vikings blitzed the Bears anywhere between 75 and 80 percent of opponent dropbacks. Over their two games, that comes to a blitz rate of 83.0 percent, according to PFF.

Is this a lot? You tell me.

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What is the precedent for this? Will the Vikings be history’s most blitz-happy team? And is that even good?

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The Gritsiest Defense

When asked “which Super Bowl-era NFL defense has set a record for the fewest points per game allowed in a single season?” most casual football fans will get it wrong. They might cite the 2000 Ravens defense, the 1985 Chicago Bears, the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers defense, a Steel Curtain or Purple People Eaters defense or some other historic, legacy-defining unit.

Certainly, the 1969 Minnesota Vikings and 1976 Pittsburgh Steelers appear high on the list — 2nd and 3rd, in fact. The 2000 Ravens are the only team since the end of the NFL dead-ball era, which ended in 1978, to appear in the top 15.

Other luminary defenses with legendary units and players show up — the 1975 Los Angeles Rams, 1971 Baltimore Colts and 1966 Packers are on the list as well.

But the 1977 Atlanta Falcons lead the way, having allowed just 9.2 points per game with an estimated defensive EPA per play of -0.21 and a defensive DVOA  of -17.7% — ranking first, fifth and 19^th in NFL history in those measures among 624 team-seasons since 1977 (the earliest year we have DVOA data for).

They’re known as the Grits Blitz.

There are nitpicks that take that Falcons team out of consideration as a candidate for the greatest defense of all time that have to do with their schedule, the league’s scoring environment, pace-of-play and so on, but they are nevertheless a dominant defense well worth evaluating.

Of these amazing historical defenses — the 2000 Ravens, the Legion of Boom, the 2002 Buccaneers, the Reggie White and Jerome Brown Eagles defenses, the Bill Walsh 49ers defenses, the Steel Curtain, the Purple People Eaters, etc. — not one has been defined more by the willingness to send extra pass rushers than the ’77 Falcons.

At least, when people remember them.

As defensive tackle Mike Lewis told Steve Hummer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2017, “Mention the Grits Blitz around Texas, it doesn't mean much. That was too long ago, plus I don't think they paid that much attention to Atlanta back then.”

That Falcons team is one of the great lost defenses throughout NFL history, alongside the 2000 Tennessee Titans, 1991 New Orleans Saints and Washington Commanders and late-80s Minnesota Vikings.

As one might expect, there aren’t advanced statistics from the era. I can’t reliably give you the 1977 Falcons' blitz rate throughout the season. But I can chart one game — their Week 6 game against the Chicago Bears — and give you an approximation.

Of course, “blitz” here — like always — requires some level of definition. Here, we mean the most basic definition: sending five or more pass rushers after the quarterback on a dropback.

That means plays where an edge rusher drops into coverage and a cornerback rushes to take his place don’t count, something we actually saw in this game despite how modern we sometimes think the tactic is.

They also deployed smaller rush-specific subpackages. Before their game against the Vikings, head coach Leeman Bennett told the Duluth News-Tribune that they subbed in Wilson Faumuina at nose tackle and Robert Pennywell at outside linebacker on third down to get more speed on the field, taking off slower defensive tackles.

And boy, did the ’77 Falcons love a sim pressure and a delayed rush.

At least five of the 14 blitzes had six or more players rushing the passer, and I counted one with eight rushers and another with nine.

And you better believe the nine-man rush was a pick.

But all in all, that game featured a blitz rate of 38.9 percent. High for any era, but not high enough to earn its own place in NFL history.

The Falcons finished .500 that year despite the historic defense, partly because of an injury to their intended starting quarterback, Steve Bartkowski, and partly because they simply didn’t have the personnel on offense, even with a healthy quarterback.

It didn’t help that they took very poor advice from statistician Bud Goode, who ran some extremely rudimentary data that concluded teams that run more often win games regardless of efficiency. While that is technically true, it reverses causality — teams that are ahead will salt out the clock by running the ball; running itself doesn't create winning.

But the Falcons were the run-heaviest team in the league despite producing the worst run efficiency in the NFL that year — again because of both injury and personnel. Bubba Bean was supposed to be their primary runner, but they relied on backup Haskel Stanback that year. And the offensive line wasn’t that good to begin with.

The Vikings, who soon return Kyler Murray, have much more to recommend themselves talent-wise on offense. Hopefully, that will be enough to push this unique defense forward.

Wait, What About the Bears

I did omit some great defenses earlier when listing them. Along with the Grits Blitz Falcons, other defenses were defined by their aggressiveness.

Photo by Chris Coduto/Getty Images

Every week this season, I’ll be breaking down the key performances from draftable prospects across the country. Here are my thoughts and takeaways from Week 2 tape study. I’ve grouped each player into tiers based on how I rated their performance.

Table of Contents

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Great

Ole Miss transfer Austin Simmons is off to a very hot start. For a quarterback who entered the season with just 108 career pass attempts, he plays with impressive poise and anticipation. He’s fearless testing tight windows and throws with precise ball placement to the intermediate sideline and middle of the field. He did a good job holding safeties with his eyes and working to the backside of the progression, though he did throw an interceptable pass down the seam vs. Cover-2. Simmons has first-round upside if he maintains this level of play against SEC competition.

Greg Johnson is my top-ranked interior offensive lineman, and he put on a clinic against Mississippi State. At 6064/327 [Editor’s Note: 6’6 ½” and 327 pounds], Johnson is an easy mover with an impenetrable anchor and refined hand usage. He varies his punch technique throughout the game and instinctively refits his hands to neutralize counters. He slides his feet quickly to protect his edges and prevent opponents from crossing his face. 

When rushers try to use power, Johnson has the mass to absorb the initial jolt and flexible hips to sink and establish leverage. He’s also highly alert to pass off stunts and diagnose exotic pressures on third down. Minnesota totaled just 13 rushing yards, but Johnson was not the issue. He had several dominant reach blocks and created decent movement at the point of attack.

Devan Thompkins was not on my radar heading into the year, but he’ll be a priority watch going forward. Thompkins is 6047/290 [6’4 ⅞”, 290] but moves like a 5-tech and has the athletic versatility to play multiple spots along the line of scrimmage. He beat the right tackle with a ghost move and bull-rushed the left guard into the quarterback’s lap. 

He also has elite length and hand pop to lock defenders out of his frame and shed with violence. Thompkins doesn't play at a consistent speed snap-to-snap and needs to improve his awareness in both phases, but NFL teams will covet his athletic traits.

Cayden Green had a down year in 2025 but was lights-out vs. Kansas in Week 2. Aside from one half-loss, his pass-blocking tape was very clean. He’s nearly impossible to bull rush and uses his strong outside hand punch to protect the corner, though his foot speed will be tested by more athletic SEC opponents. He created displacement in the gap-scheme run game and consistently widened the frontside B-gap on base blocks. He also had much more success as a zone blocker than he did last year.

Dom Nichols has been one of the most productive edge rushers in college football to start the season. Working against a bottom-tier SEC tackle, Nichols recorded eight pass-rush wins, seven pressures, and three sacks. He’s only 245 lbs, but consistently pushed the pocket with his long-arm and has a very effective hump move. 

The Michigan edge attacked the B-gap when his opponent overset or opened his hips to match his speed, and got a strip-sack with an inside spin. He won with a cross-chop but couldn't flatten at a sharp enough angle to finish the sack. I would be surprised if Nichols declared after this season, but he’s definitely worth monitoring.

Isaac Smith is a rangy safety with good size and a well-rounded skillset. He ‘allowed’ five receptions for 26 yards in this game, though none of them went for first downs. In zone coverage, he trusts his eyes and urgently makes smart decisions. He played excellent coverage on a red zone post, squaring up the stem, matching the break, closing separation, and timing his hands perfectly to break up the pass. Smith blew up a mesh-sit concept and made a few stops near the line of scrimmage. He also cleanly stacked and shed Greg Johnson at the second level.

Reed Harris had a monster performance in Week 2, recording nine receptions for 189 yards and two touchdowns. While much of his production was schemed up, Harris showed exceptional ball-tracking skills, strong breakaway speed, and a coordinated release package. He’s an above-average route salesman; however, he needs to improve his efficiency and accept less contact at the top of the stem.

Good

Anto Saka is one of the most gifted athletes in college football. At 256 lbs with decent length, his get-off and pursuit speed are overwhelming. Tackles are forced to strain to beat him to the top of the arc, but also have to worry about his speed-to-power. 

In Week 2, he won once with a long-arm and three times with speed moves, though Arizona State’s gameplan limited the number of true pass sets and opportunities to pressure the quarterback. In his first three years at Northwestern, Saka was one of the most dynamic and efficient pass rushers in the country, but he wasn’t asked to play many early downs and will need to prove that he can hold up in run support. 

On one play, Saka teleported into the backfield and met the ball carrier at the mesh point, several yards behind the line of scrimmage. He also chased down a swing pass and made a stop in the alley. While he didn’t have any dominant stack-and-shed reps, he did a solid job playing off of blocks and didn’t look out of place setting the edge.

Bo Mascoe shadowed Jeremiah Smith for most of the second half and was the only Texas defender who could remotely stick with him in single coverage. On four targets to Jeremiah Smith, Mascoe allowed zero receptions, though one incompletion was a drop. He used the sideline effectively to reroute outside releases and was competitive and disruptive at the catch point.

Caleb Woodson recorded two sacks and eight stops vs. Kentucky and has injected life into Alabama’s front-seven. He’s an active communicator with good pre-snap awareness and above-average post-snap processing. While he lacks top-tier instincts, he plays with patience and discipline to avoid overflowing or abandoning his gap. He wasn’t asked to take on blocks directly in this game, so his stack-and-shed ability is still a question. Woodson is a great athlete who has the speed to match tight ends down the seam and the quickness to beat IOL across the face as a pass rusher.

Colin Simmons performed well vs. Ohio State and looked the part of a top-ten pick. He won with power, speed, and inside moves, recording five wins, three pressures, and a sack on 27 pass rush snaps. He beat a zone cutoff and made the stop from the backside, but got stuck to a block and was driven downfield on the frontside of wide zone.

Mestemaker did not have a perfectly clean performance vs. Oregon, but he forced me to take him a lot more seriously as a prospect. He struggled against the best defenses he faced in 2025 (San Diego State/Tulane), and while Oregon’s defense was clearly overrated, this was still a major resume builder. 

He has the composure to move through his progressions from within the pocket and hit his second or third read on the backside, but he still needs to learn to climb the pocket rather than drift backward until something opens up. I reject the Josh Allen comparisons, as Mestemaker’s arm talent and movement skills are much closer to adequate than elite, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up as a first-round pick in 2028.

Jaleel Johnson is a 272-pound defensive end with a prototypical frame and an explosive first step. He recorded seven pass rush wins, five pressures, and sack in Week 2, though his presence wasn’t felt on nine run defense snaps. He has heavy hands, relentless leg drive and good pad level to displace tackles with his long arms. He won the outside track with a cross-chop (sack), swipe, and hook move, though he lacks the ankle flexion to bend tight corners through contact. This is the first game that I’ve watched, but Johnson has the athletic profile and technique of a top-75 pick.

Melvin Siani had a very solid outing against Ohio State. He was credited for allowing a sack to Kenyatta Jackson Jr., who jolted him slightly with speed-to-power, but it was far from a decisive loss, and I think Arch Manning deserved some of the blame for stepping up into pressure. Aside from that play, Siani’s anchor was rock-solid, and his lower body is as flexible as any tackle in this class. 

He explodes out of his stance to match edge speed and showed the ability to open his hips and expand his set points. Importantly, Ohio State used a lot of three-man contain rushes, so he wasn’t threatened along the outside track very often. Siani won and lost run-blocking reps at about an equal rate. He climbed smoothly to the second level and got pancakes on a backside cutoff and frontside base block. But defenders could at times shed him at the point of attack once they established first meaningful contact.

Tavion Gadson is one of the most athletic defensive tackles in the 2027 class. At 6035/302 [6’3 ⅝”, 302], he has a premier combination of length, first-step explosiveness, and bend at the top of the arc. He dusted Alabama’s right guard with a one-hand swipe and flattened to the quarterback to finish the play. 

Gadson is a disruptive presence in run support who is nearly impossible to contain on slants and gap exchanges. His movement skills and quick play diagnosis allowed him to derail several of Alabama’s gap-scheme runs. Though he lacks the mass to stand his ground against double teams, his hands are extremely violent when taking on iso blocks. He also made an outstanding hustle play to break up what should have been a touchdown near the goal line.

Above Average

This was mostly a break-even performance from Arch Manning. His box score was fairly misleading, as his receivers dropped five passes, although his ball placement definitely regressed from Week 1. He sailed a tunnel screen, placed a deep over too far in front of his receiver on third down, and threw a wobbly and slightly inaccurate backside dig. 

Manning’s processing and anticipation improved significantly towards the end of 2025, but through the first two weeks, Manning has failed to see or been unwilling to test a lot of open windows over the middle of the field. He lingered on his frontside reads for too long and missed several opportunities on the backside. However, he hit an in-breaker with anticipation to move the chains on 4th & 8 and showed good timing and confidence targeting curls/sits vs. zone coverage.

Austin Siereveld played very well at right guard for most of the game but struggled filling in at right tackle in the fourth quarter. Considering that Siereveld is a guard prospect, I’m grading this outing on a bit of a curve. He strikes opponents with heavy hands, which have been much more accurate to start out the year. 

He easily sinks his hips to curb speed-to-power and had no trouble mirroring rushers across his face. Colin Simmons burned him with a speed-rip and inside counter at right tackle. Siereveld had a solid performance in the run game but fell off of a few blocks at the point of attack.

DJ Hicks is a talented 3-tech who made a consistent impact in both phases. He repeatedly used a club or swipe-swim to cross his opponent’s face, and his glitchy lateral movements and closing burst allowed him to penetrate and finish plays in the backfield. While he put Arizona State's right guard in a blender for the entire matchup, he wasn’t able to beat the left guard. He usually got displaced when taking on double teams, however, which will be a persistent issue at 288 lbs.

Earl Little Jr. is not a Caleb Downs-caliber safety prospect, but he had a similar impact in run support against Texas. He recorded nine tackles and four stops, putting a lid on any potential explosive run that cleared the first level. He shows no hesitation triggering downhill and fitting the run, though his production reflects how poorly Ohio State’s front seven played. He drove on a crosser and almost got an interception, but had a couple missed assignments in zone coverage vs. RPOs and quick game concepts.

Kade Pieper moves and is built like a snowmobile, but he empties gaps like a snowplow. His run-blocking tape in Week 2 was good, though nothing special by his standards. He had a dominant reach block finish vs. the backside 2i, along with several other wins as a zone blocker. He popped the Will linebacker on a climb to the second level, but lost his footing several times in the run game. 

I still have concerns about his ability to hold up in pass protection at the next level, however. While he has excellent slide quickness and pocket range, he gets rocked back by initial contact, and his brittle anchor will likely be exposed by better power rushers.

Kelley Jones had an up-and-down performance against a pedestrian group of receivers. On five targets, he recorded one pass breakup and allowed three receptions for 55 yards. He broke up a fade in the red zone, but needs to play the ball instead of face-guarding at the catch point. This issue resurfaced later in the game, as he gave up a 34-yard reception down the sideline, despite being in good position, because he couldn’t turn his head around and locate the ball. 

Jones blanketed every vertical route he faced, which should be expected for a corner with his blend of size and speed. His eye discipline allowed him to anticipate route breaks, slightly offsetting his average mirror skills, though his lack of fluidity was exposed when receivers made sharp cuts at the break point or after the catch. 

Dating back to last year’s tape, he’s usually very patient in off/catch-man, remaining square with the release until the receiver declares. But in the second quarter, he bit on a fake outside release, abandoned inside leverage, and got beat on a dig. He hasn’t improved his physicality in run support and still gets stuck to perimeter blocks and driven downfield.

In his first Power-4 matchup of the year, Zabien Brown gave up a touchdown on a blown assignment but was sticky in single coverage. He played with good eye discipline and break anticipation to get an early read on routes and turned his head around to play the ball down the deep sideline. He also doesn’t shy away from fitting the run and could play nickel if teams are worried about his lack of speed.

Average

Photo by David Berding/Getty Images

At my bachelor party in Las Vegas, my future brother-in-law was having some rough luck at the blackjack table. He lost $100, then $200, then more. He kept doubling down, losing $400, then $800, and so on. 

Despite protest from the rest of the group, he resolved to keep doubling his bets until he won a hand, intending to leave the table when that one win broke him even.

He ended up taking multiple trips to the ATM and going almost $2,000 in the hole, but then the magical hand arrived. A split, mind you. He won both hands and, now up $2,000, left the casino for the weekend.

The insanity of this strategy is not lost on us, and this is now a legendary story among everyone who was there. But it makes for a pretty good metaphor for Flores’ never-say-die approach. Give up a chunk? A first down? Lose a hand? Just keep gambling, increasing the aggression until you break back into the black.

[Editor’s Note: Connoisseurs of Wide Left know that this isn’t gambling]

On Sunday afternoon, Brian Flores never let up, blitzing at an absolutely unholy rate. 73.9%, per Trumedia. 34 of 45 dropbacks. No other NFL team would dare.

holy shit!

At this astounding volume, the blitz becomes your base defense. You need coverages you can run 4 out of every 5 plays without getting gashed. You also need enough blitzes to last the whole game. If you spam the same blitz over and over, eventually the defense will catch on.

While Flores doesn’t quite go this far every game, he still blitzes enough (45% over the last three years) to require a sort of base blitz defense. Sending extra rushers and covering with six or five as a bread and butter. Which means as an offensive mastermind, preparing for Flores is unlike preparing for any other defense in the league.

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How Matt LaFleur attacked Flores, and how Flores attacked back, turned out to be the most fascinating angle of the Vikings’ 39-22 win to me. As much as it feels like an unmitigated whooping now that the dust has settled on a 17-point victory, LaFleur got his licks in too, especially early in the game.

Table of Contents

The Basics

Plainly, every single concept the Packers brought to the game has to have consideration for whether the Vikings decide to blitz against it. If they ever brought a 5-man protection, like they do on this play, then sending six can be all Flores needs. Nothing fancy needed.

From LaFleur’s perspective, he knows the Vikings will send a lot of blitzes. So to prepare, the Packers brought as many quick passing concepts as possible. Get the ball out, beat the blitz.

The motion’s impact is really interesting. I talked about it in the video version of this post on my Patreon, but for this piece, just focus on the quick timing.

So we have a game within the game. LaFleur has to predict what Flores will bring to counter him, then counter that and so on. A layered dance of reverse psychology. An ultra-evolved game of Rock-Paper-Scissors.

If the Packers can block up the blitz, then Jordan Love gets to feast on a depleted coverage structure. On this next play, they don’t block it perfectly, but hold up long enough for deep routes to develop. That’s bad news for Minnesota.

Only two defenders are to the bottom of the screen: Byron Murphy, who plays the first deep route, and Josh Metellus, playing underneath. The Packers send three threats there, and someone will be open.

Technically, Metellus could have sunk deeper to contest this pass, or Murphy could have passed his post off and driven the deep over, but with that much time, the spacing is way too wide for those kinds of adjustments to be reasonable to expect.

So the rules of the game are: Flores attacks, and LaFleur either has to dial up a quick throw or find a way to block everyone. So let’s get a little more advanced.

The Not So Basics

Start with the certainties. Split zone is a staple for Green Bay, as I pointed out in a study I did before the game. The Packers will run it regardless of gameplan.  And it makes sense — Green Bay has two good blocking tight ends in Jonnu Smith and Tucker Kraft, and split zone relies on tight end blocking.

The key for the Packers is two combo blocks on Jalen Redmond and Levi Drake Rodriguez, working up to the linebackers behind them. Jonnu Smith pulls all the way across the field to block Dallas Turner. Add a hinge block on Kyle Van Noy, and now you have split zone.

One of Flores’ main tools for exploiting this ruleset is to “slash” the front. That means asking Redmond, Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins, etc., to step hard to one side to complicate Green Bay’s blocking assignments. It’s one of Redmond’s strengths.

Another is to have Eric Wilson creep up to blitz. It all plays out like so:

Now backup left guard Donovan Jennings has to handle Wilson immediately, leaving Morgan on his own against Redmond. To do that job, Morgan has to step hard at Redmond at the start. And if you notice where Redmond is running, you’ll see an issue with that.

Amidst all this stress, Cashman works so far away from the double team that wants to block him that Sean Rhyan can’t pick him up. Both Cashman and Redmond get into the backfield, and the run can’t survive.

That’s a lot for one play, but it gives you a sense for the level of detail LaFleur and Flores are fighting over. Flores isn’t always trying to get a player entirely unblocked, but to make the Packers’ jobs hard enough that they have a high chance of failing. LaFleur is trying to push the other way. 

So let the games begin.

Forcing The Other Guy’s Hand

If you know the universalities of pass protection, as NFL defensive coordinators do, then you know the rule set you’re trying to abuse. One global pass protection rule is that the offensive line is responsible for all the defensive linemen. Bigs handle bigs.

Lines count this off in a covered-uncovered system. If you’re covered by a big, block that big. The first person who isn’t starts the slide, and everyone walls together. Whether they count from the left or the right is the center’s judgment call, depending on the front, gameplan, and situation. Here’s an example on a crucial 3rd down.

Jordan Morgan is covered by Dallas Turner. Jennings is covered by Ingram-Dawkins. Rhyan has no bigs in front of him, so this will be a three-man slide.

The Vikings know this system as well. They’re blitzing Blake Cashman here, and they want to know they are working with a 3-on-3. If the running back gets involved, it could beat this blitz, so the Vikings creep Eric Wilson up to distract him.

Both Turner and Wilson back into coverage, making this a four-man rush and wasting the play for Morgan and Chris Brooks. 

No matter which way the Packers count this, it’ll be an issue for them. Either they turn Rhyan away from Cashman, and it’s a 2-on-3, or they turn it toward Cashman, and it’s a 3-on-3 the Vikings can win.

We get the latter. Redmond attacks the center, demanding his attention, and Cashman slips in behind him. QB hit, incomplete.

With Brooks’ eyes drawn to Wilson, Turner and Ingram-Dawkins, he works away and is effectively neutralized. 

What’s cool here is that the Vikings design a blitz to attack classic pass-protection structures, then don’t actually have to blitz to win. They have an unblocked player on a four-man rush. So if it doesn’t get home, the coverage will hold up longer than six- or five-man coverages.

The disadvantage to this simulated pressure strategy is that it often asks pass rushers to cover. That’s better than nobody, but is still exploitable. Here, Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins is pressed into coverage, and Jordan Love finds him quickly.

So the question becomes, who is blitzing, who isn’t, and where are they coming from? And can Green Bay anticipate the answer and counter it?

Where To Send The Blitz?

Blitzes can’t disrupt the entire field, or they’d be the only thing a defensive coordinator needs. Flores usually targets a specific blocker or area, at the risk of weakness elsewhere. If LaFleur can anticipate where the blitz is coming from, he can find a weak spot to attack.

Photo by Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images

It’s hard to imagine a bigger roller coaster than the Minnesota Vikings and, more than that, the performance they put together in their unlikely win over the Green Bay Packers. Some of it was intentional and much of it was not.

But, against good teams, that’s where they plan to live.

Is it sustainable? Is it going to take them to the playoffs? Is it going to restore Kevin O’Connell’s reputation as a quarterback whisperer? Who knows. All we can determine at this point is that the journey is going to be a heart attack.

The game opened with a Kyler Murray interception, a panic ball off of his back foot against pressure. The Packers didn’t do very much to capitalize on it, with the Vikings’ own pressure package harassing the backfield. That, and a false start penalty, held the Packers to a long field goal attempt despite the favorable field position.

At the conclusion of their opening series, both Jordan Love and Murray produced under negative-one EPA per play.

It really felt like that was going to be the story of the game, but a brutal injury to Murray on his fifth dropback and a nearly back-breaking big play from Christian Watson produced a new narrative direction for the game.

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From there, it felt like the best a Vikings fan could hope for was to hold on and hope the pain wouldn’t be too unbearable. Surely, it wouldn’t be — the fanbase has suffered worse than a humiliation from a rival on opening weekend.

In short, the repeated gut punches had prepared them for a swift kick in the teeth.

There wasn’t much throughout the first three quarters that dispelled that, though they did stem the bleeding — the quick strike in the middle of the first quarter wasn’t replicated and the Packers managed 2.17 points per drive following that. Not a drought, but not as brutal as how the game began.

And a truth emerged from that experience — Jordan Love was struggling. It didn’t seem like that at first; in the first half he was averaging 10.5 yards per attempt with a passer rating of 120.3 and +0.31 expected points per dropback.

But a typical Love dropback featured more problems than solutions, buttressed by an 81-yard catch-and-run from Watson, a speed/size wunderkind who had signed a new deal and out-angled safety Theo Jackson to the sideline and open space.

He was successful on only 36.8 percent of his dropbacks. The NFL average this week was 45 percent and the high-level quarterbacks were generating success at a 65 percent clip. He was completing just 47.4 percent of his passes, and a quarter of those completions weren’t even helping the offense.

Without that Watson catch — which is important to consider given that it counts on the scoreboard and tells us about the Vikings’ risk profile on defense — Love only generated 6.6 yards per attempt and produced negative expected points, even without throwing a pick. On average, his per-dropback EPA was -0.04 without one throw to Watson.

These aren’t mere outliers to eliminate when considering the nature of the Vikings defense — D.K. Metcalf torched the Vikings in just as embarrassing a manner last year, after all — but it does explain why the Vikings had a path to victory despite top-level statistics that suggested Love was dealing.

That opened the door for the Vikings to score 29 points unanswered. But it started with the defense.

So, let’s talk about that. What is the story of this defense?

Table of Contents

It’s Not Gambling, But It’s Not Not Gambling Either

The Vikings defensive strategy has always been to play the law of averages, a surprisingly steady-sounding approach until you realize what it entails. On average, quarterbacks do poorly under pressure, and one of the easiest ways to generate pressure is through effectively designed blitzes.

So, blitz.

But wait, hold on. If it’s that simple, why don’t all teams do this?

Well, aside from the fact that “effectively designed” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, it’s also the case that blitzes create voids in the coverage, allowing teams to generate enormous gains when pressure doesn’t get home.

When the blitz doesn’t get home — which is to say when the quarterback completes a pass against the blitz — things get dicey. Since 2021, completions against the blitz have generated 11.9 yards per play, +1.00 EPA per play, a 9.9% touchdown rate and a success rate over 75 percent. 16.8 percent of those throws gain 20 yards or more.

Completions on non-blitzed passes are pretty effective too, of course. After all, we’re filtering for a generally successfully thrown ball. But it’s not nearly the same; the yards per play drops to 10.6, the EPA per plays drops to +0.70, the success rate drops to 68.7 percent and the touchdown rate plummets to 5.7 percent. 12.6 percent of them go for 20 yards or more.

So the risk is there. But the payoff for a successful defensive play is tremendous.

On plays where the offense fails, the likelihood that the failure is significant is much larger on a blitz than a non-blitz. We can visualize this as the rate of “big negative plays” for the offense, which we’ll define as plays worth -1.0 EPA or less — these are plays like a big incompletion on third down, a devastating second-down sack, or a turnover.

On blitzes, 36.7 percent of negative offensive plays were big. 0.6 percent of them saw a defensive score. On non-blitzes, 27.9 percent of negative offensive plays were big and 0.4 percent saw a defensive score.

So, if one is successful on defense, one is 50 more likely to create a big play on a blitz than a non-blitz. But the risk is that the offense is more likely to come up big, too.

If one is generally better at creating negatives on blitzes than non-blitzes, then it’s volatile but it’s not really gambling.

It’s card counting.

Card counters often do not like being called gamblers; they are playing in a very calculated way without the connotation of uncertainty suggested by “gambling.” After all, we rarely say that casinos are “gambling” with their assets when they put games out onto the casino floor.

In blackjack, the house “edge” is at its lowest about 0.4 percent, though that can expand all the way to 2.2% depending on the specific rules for any particular table. Over many hands and a long enough timeline, the house reliably earns thousands of dollars over its shifts, even if it loses big on individual hands or even in a single shift.

Card counters aim to reverse that edge by keeping track of the high cards in the shoe (the collection of cards the dealer uses, composed of multiple decks) and playing the odds as the count increases or decreases.

For example, if there aren’t many face cards left in the shoe, you can play more aggressively than normal when holding a 16 or when the dealer shows a ten. The edge is small but realizable over a large number of hands, flipping the house edge from +0.4% to -0.4% or more. Card counters are playing the long game.

In fact, there’s a reason it’s not actually called the law of averages.

It’s called the law of large numbers.

We have to wait a while for it to play out.

Assuming that two strategies are equal, the high-volatility strategy is going to be the one that pumps your heart up. Let’s use a hypothetical example of a blitz versus a four-man rush:

Wait, sorry. I meant this one:

Blitzing this often, of course, is more than a cold calculation of what works best. It’s a lifestyle. And it’s one the Vikings have been cultivating for years, allowing players to do what many would-be card counters can’t: emotionally accept the bad swings and volatility, knowing that it will work out in the end.

When emotions run high and capture your brain, it’s difficult to pay attention to details. Card counters tilt and chase losses just like any other gambler. Defenders abandon gap assignments to try and shoot the backfield and make a big play.

Fans (and sportswriters) don’t really have to worry about all that; when the Vikings engage in high-risk strategy and we see the negative end of that variance, we crash out. The players and coaches can’t — they have to trust the process or the whole thing falls apart.

Trust the count.

Screenshot from card counter Steven Bridges’ YouTube channel.

No one seemingly followed that through more than Brian Flores, the Vikings blitz-happy defensive coordinator.

Flores blitzed the Packers at a blistering 78.3 percent, according to Next Gen Stats, the highest rate for a team in a single game since Week 18 of 2023 … when Brian Flores blitzed the Detroit Lions at a 78.8 percent rate. That was the most since Week 3 of 2023 … when Brian Flores blitzed the Chargers at an 81.6 percent rate.

Extreme blitz rates — that is, blitz rates in the 95^th percentile and above — for an average team throughout an entire season fall just shy of 50 percent. That means, for most teams, one might never see a game all season where they send more than four pass rushers on half of opponents’ dropbacks.

The average blitz rate for a non-Flores team since 2016 has been 27.6 percent. For Flores? 42.6 percent. And in the last three years, it has been 47.4 percent.

That is to say that the average Flores game is the most extreme game a typical team might put together all year.

All of this together put the Vikings, then the Packers, in hell.

The brutal beauty of the Vikings blitz — the ones that saw Vikings defenders grasping to tackle receivers after the catch — demolished the Green Bay offense in the fourth quarter.

Twitter tweet

Love’s success rate wasn’t any different in the fourth quarter than it was in the first half, generating a positive play on 38.9 percent of dropbacks. But without a big play to make up for a dozen small losses, he averaged -0.45 EPA per dropback.

The raw passing was alright — 7.13 yards per passing attempt. But within that were three sacks on 18 dropbacks (16.7 percent) and a pick. He completed just 46.7 percent of his throws. Their drive success rate — that is, the ability to produce first downs per series — was just 42.9 percent in the fourth quarter, just one rank higher than the Las Vegas Raiders at 40.0 percent.

Last year, the last-place Cleveland Browns produced a drive success rate of 61.7 percent. So, for a moment, volatility swung in the Vikings’ favor, and they made the high-flying Packers, last year’s fourth-most efficient offense, look worse than the Browns.

Defensive Standouts

Perhaps no player better authored this Vikings win than Dallas Turner. In the official statbook — or the closest one to it, the play-by-play logs used by the league, ESPN and Elias Sports Bureau — Turner finished with seven quarterback hits, the most any defensive player has logged since Gregory Rousseau did in Week 16 of last year. Before that, Trey Hendrickson hit that mark in Week 9 of 2024 against the Las Vegas Raiders.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It’s the 25^th anniversary of 9/11, an odd sentence if only because anniversary feels like a word used in celebration and 9/11 — for all the memes it produces today — was one of the most collectively traumatic events in recent American history.

It feels incomplete to discuss September 11th, the cultural product, in just 5,000 words. Not because it’s too somber, but because it is both too large and too stupid.

Importantly, there’s no real issue with people making fun of the fact that 9/11 was a defining, epoch-changing event in the lives of millennials, but one can recognize the absurdity of memes and their intended shock value while also understanding that it was formative.

It was formative. But it was formative for different people in different ways.

Millennial Whining

It certainly has been a millennial activity to talk to others about where they were when they learned the towers had been attacked. It’s not a particularly interesting story most of the time. It happened on a Tuesday morning, so most of us were in school.

My experience, probably unsurprising to most people, was characterized by arguing with a teacher.

We had just switched to block scheduling at our school, and the administrators had to invent a class to fill the gap in the schedule — seven classes converted into eight blocks meant they had to produce a new subject. Our school district, I would argue, did a very poor job figuring it out.

The class they invented was “Communications,” meant to draw coursework from many of the other classes to reduce teacher and student workload in those subjects, particularly in Language Arts. It proved to be a fairly aimless block, and I likely would have forgotten it if it weren’t for 9/11, which is probably the least of that day’s legacies.

As we filed into that class to begin our second block of the day, one of my classmates, Jack, asked the teacher to turn on the television. I snorted in laughter, thinking it was kind of a silly request. Sure, the class seemed useless, even this early in the year, but television? Alright, Jack.

Imagine turning on the television in a middle school classroom and seeing this. Photo by Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images

Our teacher knew why Jack had asked. I remember our teacher smiling at him, telling him no with a chuckle. It felt condescending in the moment, and particularly so after I had learned why Jack had asked him to turn on the TV.

So, after a surprise midday announcement informed us of what had happened, the class erupted into chaos, with the teacher attempting to calm a bunch of panicking eighth graders.

It is perhaps in that spirit that he responded to a question, “Are we going to war!?” with a calm, smiling… patronizing… shake of his head. He said, “No, we’re not.”

I couldn’t help myself. Instinctively, before my conscious self could even process the notion of restraint, I yelled, “bullshit!”

He didn’t appreciate that.

Perhaps that was the wrong move on my part. In fact, it almost certainly was. But it also was probably not smart of him to set up a position so wrong that it could be foiled by the political instincts of an eighth grader.

I made my case, loudly. The teacher attempted to calm me down.

I yelled that I was calm.

It was pretty apparent, even at the time, that I couldn’t process 9/11. What I could process, however, was someone being wrong. So, I focused on that.

In my memory, I argued that the first attack on the American mainland in nearly two centuries would demand a military response. Whether that information — it being the first attack on the continental United States since the War of 1812 (not true) — was something I learned from the announcement or the television (perhaps turned on after the announcement?), I have no idea. It may even be the case that this specific argument is a memory I fabricated after the fact to make me look better in my own head.

But I do know I made the argument that war was inevitable. And I was pissed that a teacher who knew better would lie to us.

I don’t think I was very cognizant of what it might look like for the only Brown kid in the class to argue vociferously with a white teacher that we were going to war.

Browning Myself

There is something unsettling about growing up as a first-generation immigrant (which some refer to as “second-generation immigrant” because no one has agreed on the label) in the United States. Those familiar with the story might roll their eyes at how often they hear about the “unique” dynamic of having a foot in both worlds but belonging to neither one. It’s been a trope so long in these communities that comedians familiar with it roast it pretty effectively — Hari Kondabolu is astounding at that.

But this dispossession, as overbearing as it is to hear for some, is genuine. There is something indefinably alienating to know that culture is not produced for you in any meaningful sense.

It is not just that the heroes on television and in movies are white — though that does have an effect — it is that there has been virtually no reflection of my experience in media. There are a million cultural signals one absorbs in family environments that are assumed in media. And, it turns out, in daily life.

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As one of a million examples, I recall going on a date with a friend I had known for years, and I sensed her getting upset with me throughout the date, and I had no idea why. I think in most contexts this could just be chalked up to the general obliviousness of a college sophomore.

But in this case, I happened to ask her. She told me that, in addition to me not holding the door open for her or pulling her chair out, she was upset that I ordered food first when the server arrived to take our orders.

Obviously, the broader picture is clear: we weren’t compatible and this particular kind of gendered deference isn’t something I value or expect a partner to value. But that’s not really what stood out to me, especially at the time. I was stunned to learn that there had ever been an expectation (in a straight relationship, anyway) that the man let the woman order first in a restaurant.

It had never been communicated to me, either as an expectation in my life or something people had ever done.

Unspeakably evil brown guy in Jack Ryan, a show I’ve watched twice now.

This kind of alienation extends beyond an outdated relationship convention. There are dozens of social signals and norms I missed out on by not growing up in a white household, and there wasn’t a community of people who had an established culture I could be in conversation with.

I had to adopt the culture around me with none of the guidance others had. That means that I had to learn what Christmas is while I was selling wreaths for the Cub Scouts. Feeling left out, I begged my parents to celebrate and in so doing I had to teach them, using secondhand knowledge, what it is.

My neighbors had to teach me that it’s a rite of passage to take training wheels off of a bicycle — my parents had no idea that you were supposed to take them off. My fourth-grade teacher made fun of me (with the class laughing along) for not knowing who John Wayne was.

I share all of this not to relitigate past grievances — events I consider important enough to remember but not anything I regard as traumatic — but rather to emphasize how strange it was for my alienation to turn from an afterthought to become part of the national conversation.

I think it is difficult for many conservatives to understand the notion that race can be both a critical element of one’s identity but also not one that defines an identity.

To me, I am Arif. Not a Brown person first, Arif second. To my friends and peers around me, I am Arif. In lily-white Grand Forks, North Dakota, the students and teachers at the school, I am confident, understood me first as Arif and second as someone with a different skin color who didn’t quite get it.

But parceling out the portions of my identity that were obsessed with dinosaurs and Zoobooks and the parts of my identity that were formed by having to explain that turkey sandwiches on Thanksgiving weren’t really what I meant by turkey is nearly impossible. Both are me.

Pictured: me

And that disconnection ran both ways; my parents could not relate to me or understand how I interacted with the world. I was not allowed to visit friends’ houses until much later than any other peer. I never went to sleepovers. Any friendships with girls were forbidden and then, when that rule became impossible to enforce, frowned upon.

I don’t speak Bangla, the language of my parents, and I don’t celebrate Bengali holidays. My parents tried to instill Muslim values in me and I occasionally practiced — but it didn’t stick. I don’t watch or understand their movies or music.

Cultural events were few and far between. I grew up hating my difference; for quite some time I refused to eat Bengali, Pakistani or Indian food on principle.

This alienation and cultural isolation is why Kal Penn is one of my favorite actors. For quite some time, this confused people.

Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle?

But, in what seems to be a less notable role than Kumar from White Castle or even Seth Wright from the other Kiefer Sutherland show, Designated Survivor, Penn changed my life with his role as Nikhil/Gogol in The Namesake, an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri.

The book follows two generations of immigrants: the first-generation Ashoke and Ashima as they immigrate shortly after their arranged marriage from Kolkata, India, to New York and then follows Gogol and Sonia, their children.

The movie focuses much more on Gogol, who hates his name enough that he chooses to go by Nikhil (or “Nicky”), though Nair does give enough breathing room to the parents to tell their stories with enough depth to make their struggles central features of the narrative.

Penn and director Mira Nair beautifully capture the isolated spirit of the alienated child-of-immigrants as Gogol attempts to navigate both worlds, never fitting into either as he swings wildly between embracing one or the other.

Irrfan Khan’s portrayal of Ashoke, Gogol’s father, so powerfully reminded me of my own father that I cried when I learned he had passed away in 2020. To date, this is the only public figure I can recall mourning with such intensity.

I remember when Penn was campaigning across the country to get out the vote for Barack Obama, and he stopped at Macalester College, the school my then-girlfriend was attending. I had no idea he would be there, and so I was shocked to see him walk into the cafeteria.

He was mobbed by the students, almost all of whom were quoting lines from White Castle at him. I didn’t want to bother him. My then-girlfriend prodded me into talking to him, and I’m glad she did so. I worked my way through the crowd to shake his hand and told him The Namesake changed my life.

It’s strange knowing that a core memory of your life with another person is almost certainly not remembered by that other person. But it very much seemed like the world grew quiet around us as his face changed, dropping his campaigning and celebrity smile to look at me with all the seriousness in the world to thank me for telling him.

An almost tragic “Known for” section

I recommend the movie.

This aside wasn’t to whine about being an immigrant but rather to point out this alienation occurred largely invisibly until it didn’t.

On a random Tuesday, I became a spokesperson for “reasonable Muslims,” somehow responsible for establishing the cultural paradigm of how white people interact with Brown people and what Brown people looked like.

I found myself defending a religion I was not particularly attached to but one that was persistently attached to me. So, for the first time in my life, I was defined by what I was not more than by what I was.

On the way to school, my mom would tell me not to advertise the fact that I was a Muslim, as if I could hide my brown skin or the fact that I had an Arabic name. I pushed back, arguing that this served as an opportunity to educate my peers.

I’m not sure either of us was correct, but certainly the fear represented in my mother’s plea was well-founded.

At the time, my mother and I had already moved to Bloomington, Minnesota, while my father was still in Grand Forks, looking for appropriate work closer to the cities before joining us in Minnesota.

There are a few gas stations in Grand Forks frequented by truckers, meaning many of the people filling up there aren’t from the town. My father was filling up his car at one of these stations when a trucker told him he wasn’t welcome there. He, in my father’s recounting, walked up to my dad menacingly.

Before my dad could respond, someone else pumping gas intervened. He told my dad’s harasser that it was clear the harasser wasn’t from here, and that he should continue filling up and then leave.

It worked. The trucker, seeing no support, went back to filling up his gas before departing.

It’s a story that contains within it terror and hope, the ugliness of division and the beauty of unity. It feels like a just-so, simple narrative.

I want to say this says so much about the town I grew up in, the town that came together during the Big Flood, and a town that helped push North Dakota to be the most performant state in educational metrics like NAEP math and science scores throughout the 1990s.

And in a way, it does.

I can’t speak to the racial animus of North Dakotans as I was growing up; I didn’t experience much more than the casual ignorance one would expect of an overwhelmingly white town, which is not the same thing as malice. But I do know that I would occasionally overhear rumors of hate crimes on the outskirts of town.

There’s not much to do with those rumors except catalog them. I only re-remembered them after my father told me about his near-incident at the gas station.

This re-realization of my racial otherness is a difficult thing to describe. There is, for many immigrants and children of immigrants a desire — unconscious or otherwise — to want to absorb a kind of whiteness (this is not universally understood and the literature is very contested). In this sense, whiteness does not mean the desire to literally become white, but rather to orient oneself as the default, the norm.

This is the “whiteness” of South Asian Republicans.

I’m so sick of your shit, dude

To see oneself in the media that does not reflect the mirror image back. To accept that the protagonist of the story you invent in your head is, naturally, a white person (usually a man).

Whiteness as a historical sociological construct is defined largely by opposition; whiteness is usually “not Blackness.” That is why, sometimes, sociologists will say there is no “white culture” even as there are inarguably cultural products produced by people who identify as white within a common culture.

They are not (usually) saying “white people do not have culture” or that there isn’t something indelible about the cultural products of Anglo-Saxon protestants in New England or Scandinavian Lutherans in Minnesota or white (often Irish-Scottish) Appalachians.

But rather it’s a historical recognition that whiteness as a concept did not exist until it was produced to otherize Blackness and, sometimes, “the Orient” (which historically included the Middle East as well as the “Far East”). Prior to these inventions, we’d see distinctness in European identities and subcultures; one was Gallic or Bohemian or Irish.

This is why whiteness was flexible. In being defined by what it is not instead of what it is, it could strategically include or exclude Irish, Italian, Polish or even Arab people from the class of white.

In The Limits of Whiteness, author Neda Maghbouleh argues that Iranians are both white and nonwhite when it becomes convenient to the politics of otherness, legally white (until extremely recently), often benefiting from white supremacy in some contexts and subject to racial discrimination and violence in other contexts.

It is this liminal space I occupied on September 11 and the years afterward.

Generally speaking, white people are not conscious of their racial identity in the way that racialized others are because of the norm-setting power of whiteness. The “default subject” is white. In a sense, whiteness is equated with racelessness — the luxury of not thinking about behaviors and perspectives as white-specific, instead thinking of them as “normal.”

I and many other children of immigrants had, prior to September 11, lived in an in-between zone. Not strategically white in the sense that I would ever be mistaken for white — but not othered like the Native children around me or the Black people on television. I would be reminded of my difference but invited to temporarily ignore it. And so, in that sense, I had access to occasional racelessness that many others did not.

Not after September 11.

I guess what I’m saying is that 9/11 is a mere event to a lot of people. To me it’s a turning point. But for most, in our cultural production of the event, 9/11 carries with it the memories of tragedy and some kind of sense of national pride, a moment of unity.

Unity

If just under 500 hate crime incidents seems outstandingly low, it’s not because the incidents we know about were overhyped but rather because these kinds of hate crimes are undercounted. Violence of this type can be categorized as anti-Muslim, anti-Arab or even anti-Sikh. And, importantly, violence against Arab-Americans is systemically and egregiously underreported, in part because of the removal of the category in 1992 (restored just recently in 2015) and in part because reporting to the FBI by local law enforcement is patchwork and voluntary.

They also, apparently, disappear on their way from state agencies to the FBI. The number of vanishing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes seemingly equals the number of ones that are properly logged.

And when one asks households instead of police departments in victimization surveys, the undercount from federal statistics seems to be thirtyfold. And yeah, 15,000 seems more accurate than 500.

Bush Did 9/11 (Racism)

Photo by Patrick McDermott/Getty Images

I recently had a (very long) conversation with Jason Hirschhorn about the upcoming Packers-Vikings game at The Leap. We had a wide-ranging discussion covering every position group on the Green Bay Packers and how it interacts with the Vikings.

For the reciprocal piece, check out Hirschhorn’s reciprocal piece asking me about the Vikings.

My conversation with Hirschhorn covered the Packers’ ambiguity at offensive line, running back and cornerback, as well as how Jordan Love and Matt LaFleur plan to change the offense and deal with the Brian Flores defense.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

Table of Contents

The Green Bay Packers Offense

Offensive Line Ambiguity

Arif:

The Packers have demonstrated a lot of ambiguity about who might start along the offensive line and at cornerback. Should we expect Aaron Banks and Zach Bako-Bewele? Who are the starting five?

Jason:

There are two starters, at least on what would be the unofficial depth chart of the Packers, that you have to have at least some question about actually playing in Sunday's game or playing all of Sunday's game.

You mentioned Aaron Banks. That's one of them. He has dealt with a variety of injuries since he arrived in Green Bay in 2025. At one point earlier in the offseason, he did have whatever the 28-year-old version of a clean bill of health is, and then some knee issues started to come up right around the time of training camp. He has gotten back into practice, so it's not as though he has not worked with the starting offense in any way, but he also has not had a full normal practice at any point in training camp or just in 2026 — like the calendar year.

So, there's that question with Zach Bako-Bewele, and I'll just remind your audience who may not know: that's Zach Tom. He is in the process of legally changing his last name from Tom to Bako-Bewele. When you see that hyphenated name on the field, that's who that is. He is coming off a partially torn … I always forget if it’s a patellar or patella tendon, whichever one of those things can be torn; he partially tore it —

Arif:

I believe the bone is called the patella, and the tendon is the patellar tendon. But I’m not a doctor.

[Editor’s Note: I was right; that means I’m legally entitled to a medical degree]

Jason:

Well, we're both not doctors, so we're very quick to answer these questions. But he, like Banks, has returned to practice, and he’s probably had more consistent work than Banks has had in training camp.

But that's not the same as saying he's had normal reps. Like, even after he came back to practice, he was not participating in the 11-on-11 period. And then when he did move into 11-on-11, the Packers coaching staff was rotating him at least at a certain point with Anthony Belton, the guy who I presume would play in his stead if Bako-Bewele either can't go or if he's in a rotation or if he starts the game and has to drop out, whichever one of those situations could transpire.

The Packers coaching staff could be engaging in gamesmanship, but I'm not actually sure that they are. Matt LaFleur was asked about this earlier this week, and he gave one of those answers where you're like, "I really cannot tell if you're just being honest here, or if this is just like we want to gain that like 1% of 1% of 1% of an advantage in our heads by not making it clear to the Vikings that these players will or won't be playing.”

But the one person on the Packers coaching staff — who I'm not saying he doesn't BS, but like probably BSs very little by the standards of football coaches — is offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich. He was asked about this, and he was like, "I don't really know who the starting five are going to be in week one. Like I know what Zach Bako-Bewele will be once he's on the field, and I know approximately what Aaron Banks will be when he's on the field, but I can't guarantee you —” and I'm paraphrasing here “— if either those guys are going to be on the field or how much they play.”

And keep in mind, the Packers are one of like the few — I want to say not just NFL teams, but like major football programs in the country — that actually have a track record of rotating offensive linemen in games, so it is entirely possible that Aaron Banks starts Sunday's game at left guard, and Zach Bako-Bewele starts the game at right tackle, and then one or two drives in, you have different people occupying both of those spots, or one of those spots, or whatever it might be.

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If Aaron Banks either doesn't play or does not play the full game, I would expect rookie fifth-round pick Jager Burton to be the first man up in that spot. There was a period of time where it seemed like he actually might end up being like the starting right guard, but with Banks' knee issues, they kind of just committed him mostly to the left guard spot, just so they would have someone as ready to go as possible for if and when Banks was to miss time.

And I already mentioned Anthony Belton, the most likely guy to come in for Zach Bako-Bewele if he doesn't play the full game or doesn't play in the game at all. Other than that, Jordan Morgan will be the starting left tackle.

The center will be Sean Rhyan, the guy who finished in that position last season, and Jacob Monk, a late-round pick from a few years ago, is pretty hammered on at this point as the week one starting right guard. I don't know if that's going to be the case for the whole season. I have my doubts about that, to be honest. But at least this week, that appears to be the guy who's going to start in that position.

Arif:

So, the Packers have historically had a pretty excellent offensive line, and that's winnowed away, I think, over the past couple of years. Fully healthy — so that's with Aaron Banks and Bako-Bewele playing — how confident are you in this offensive line?

Jason:

Relative to, let's just say, the Packers' offensive lines of the early LaFleur era till like the first year of Jordan Love — that being 2019 to 2023 — I think it's not reasonable to expect, even if everybody involved is healthy or as healthy as they can be, for this version of the offensive line to be as good as those.

Now, I think there's reason to believe that this offensive line could be better than the version they had last year. Jordan Morgan has not really spent a lot of time in regular season or playoff games at left tackle, but that is the spot that he played exclusively at Arizona. And the returns from training camp and the preseason, such as they are, have been very positive. And it seems like he is going to be a capable left tackle.

Whether or not he's anything more than that remains completely unclear because you cannot really assess more than a little bit, if even a little bit, from preseason games. But he looks like someone who's going to be better in pass protection, or at least no worse in pass protection than last year's starter Rasheed Walker, and he might have some advantages in the run game that Rasheed Walker didn't have, so there's a scenario where that spot is better.

Now, Banks in 2025 was outside of the short period of time late in the regular season, not very effective, and almost all of that coincided with injury. So, if he's healthy, there's reason to believe that he could actually play reasonably well. Like no one's going to confuse him for an All-Pro guard, but he can be someone who can actually hold that spot pretty well when he's healthy

Photo by Michael Owens/Getty Images

But as we already discussed, he is currently not healthy, and there is no indication that he is going to be as healthy as someone can be in the middle of a season anytime soon. So I have significant doubts about his effectiveness, pretty much at any point moving forward.

For the other spots, like Zach Bako-Bewele, even a diminished version of him is still probably going to be their best offensive lineman. He's just dealing with a higher floor and higher ceiling than I think anyone else on that unit. Sean Rhyan, I thought, was mostly fine once he moved to center last season. This is his first year where he's fully preparing to be in that spot. There's a scenario where he's a little bit better than he was last year, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect him to go from a passable center to someone who's like a plus starter there. It's not impossible that happens, but I personally wouldn't expect it.

Jacob Monk, again, is going to be, it seems, the Week One starter at right guard. I do not know that that will be the guy starting at right guard by October. Not because there's no way that's the case. It's more that there's very little to go off of the training camp reps that were available to the public, and the preseason work that he got in was not terrible, but also wasn't like so dominant.

We can see why the coaching staff really likes this guy. They've talked about his “play style,” which has been the term of art used by the coaching staff as it pertains to Jacob Monk, and thus far, it's kind of hard to see what they really mean. Like, you know, he's got the tenacity, nastiness, etc., that is generally associated with a good offensive lineman. But at some point, that has to also be associated with consistent pass protection and moving people in the run game. And at least thus far, he has not shown those things.

I wonder if part of the reason he is the Week One starter at guard, like right guard in particular, is because the Packers know they're playing a Brian Flores defense, and maybe you wouldn't want to throw a rookie like Jager Burton, even if you like him.

You wouldn't necessarily want to throw him into like that maelstrom right off the bat, and maybe that's the situation they're trying to shield him from early on, and then he maybe takes that job at some point later in the season.

I don't know how much the Packers can really confidently know themselves because Monk has barely played in the NFL. His only career start, funny enough, was against the Vikings last season, and that was a situation where the Packers basically didn't play any of their meaningful players. And Jacob Monk was fine.

Jordan Love vs. the Blitz

Arif: That does implicate what characterizes the Vikings' defense, which is how blitz-heavy they are and how often they get pressure. They had the fastest time to pressure in the NFL last year. Not a huge surprise, given how they organize their pass rush.

Typically Jordan Love is even better against the blitz than he is otherwise. But against the Vikings' blitz, he does actually seem to get worse than he does otherwise. So I'm a little curious how they're going to approach it.

It seems like in the preseason — which, you know, who knows; it’s the preseason — they were much more willing to do stuff like take short, quick passes than Jordan Love has typically done in the past. He's a deep ball passer, and his response to the blitz is to throw even deeper.

The Vikings, against every other team in the NFL last year, held their opponent to the lowest opposing depth of target because of the way that they play, and found themselves going up against deep ball passing from Jordan Love.

How do we expect Jordan Love to approach the way that the Vikings do defense this year, and is it going to meaningfully change over the last four or five games he's played against Brian Flores' defense?

Jason: You already threw out the necessary caveat that we don't always know how much of what we see in the preseason is indicative of what a team does or doesn't plan to do in the regular season.

So, with that caveat out there, I want to remind your audience — if they were even aware of this — back when the NFL had its annual league meeting with whatever super nice resorts and all the coaches there with the photos and all that stuff. Matt LaFleur was asked about the offense, and he said in so many words that part of their off-season plan is to kind of go back down to the foundational elements and then build back out from there.

And you know that's a vague enough description that it can mean any number of things, right? Like, we're just going to reteach the fundamentals, but we're going to do more or less what we did last year. That could be “we're going to go back to the fundamentals and maybe make those a larger piece of the offense,” and for much of this year, it was really hard to say what that did or didn't mean, and it's still somewhat ambiguous.

But again, if the preseason provides any indication here — and maybe it does, maybe it doesn't — I tend to think some of it is telling. The Packers have gone back to some of the foundational principles that Lafleur put in back in 2019 and 2020, his first two seasons with the Packers.

Now back then, they were more of an under-center team than they were last year. They also ran more outside zone than they did last year. They ran a lot more bootlegs than we've seen from the Packers in quite a few years.

And what I think you described in your question, where there's a lot of like — you didn't say play action — but play action with those kind of slice routes that come underneath the offensive line, and they're quick throws.

It's a way, in some ways, of like hiding the offensive line deficiencies because it's play action, which can slow down the defense, and they're quick passes to one side, so you have the quarterback on the move away, presumably, from the defenders, as just a way that you can get pretty easy layups against defenses that are trying to come after you.

I think that's going to be one of their answers, not specifically to the Vikings, but to pass rushes this year. And obviously, there's only so many of those you can call before the returns diminish. But they were not calling a lot of those last year.

I don't have the number in front of me, but I like anecdotally it seemed like it was the lowest number of like quarterback keepers, nakeds, bootlegs, however you want to describe them, that they've had during the entirety of the excuse me the LaFleur era.

I expect them to use more of that at least while they're figuring out what that offensive line needs to look like. Like if they get to the point, let's say in like late October, and they've kind of coalesced around a group of five offensive linemen that they feel reasonably comfortable with as their pass protectors, maybe they start moving into other directions.

But until something like that happens, I think they're going to have to put Jordan Love on the move more often than they have in the past, and that is not the only way, but a way that you can kind of get around a high-pressure defense like the Vikings have.

Running Back Purgatory

Arif: One element of pass protection is usually the running back, but the running back is gone, on the commissioner's exempt list. They did trade for Kaleb Johnson; I'm curious how much he's expected to play. I'm also curious how many snaps in this game. MarShawn Lloyd will choose to be healthy. What should we expect from the Packers running back group?

Jason: So, in terms of the running backs that are officially on the 53 — I'm just going to throw that caveat now, so we don't have to say it every single time — it is somewhat unclear.

Now, I mentioned in my answer to my previous question that I think they're in general going back to a lot more like core principles of LaFleur's offense from early in his tenure in Green Bay, and as I said before, they ran a lot more outside zone from under center than they have in the last few years.

If you look at the running backs presently at the top of their depth chart… Marshawn Lloyd is someone who, at least in terms of his skill set, would make sense in those kinds of runs. And Kaleb Johnson had a lot of success in college on outside zone. That was something that the Packers, both their general manager and head coach Matt LaFleur, mentioned after that trade went through.

I think that provides at least some sign that they expect Kaleb Johnson to be a meaningful part of that rushing attack as it presently exists with the players that they currently have on the 53.

But I don't really think that he's going to have a giant role in Week One because I kind of don't know how he could. He's still a very young player; this is his second season. He, I mean, he did have a rookie season in Pittsburgh, but like by the midpoint of 2025, he just wasn't really a part of that offense, and I don't really know how prepared he is to come into any team, whether it was Green Bay or someone else, and like take five to ten carries off the bat. Maybe that happens.

Photo by Dustin Bradford/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

I think it's more likely that MarShawn Lloyd ends up being maybe not the top running back in terms of pure snap count, but the top running back in terms of touches in Week One. And offensive coordinator Stenavich hinted at that earlier today in his press conference. So we have again some sign that that might be the case, and I expect that you'll see a lot of Chris Brooks in obvious passing situations, he is not much of a ball carrier, but he's kind of good at everything else.

Like he's their best pass protector. That was true last season as well. And with a team like the Vikings facing you, you probably do want a pass protector in their running back, right? So, I think he's going to see a fair amount of snaps. Just know how many touches he's ultimately going to get, at least as like pure handoffs.

And I expect right now, though they have not said for sure this is going to happen, that Pierre Strong Jr. will be a game-day elevation from the practice squad, and then that combination will probably be the core of what they use in Week One. It doesn't mean that Kaleb Johnson won't be active and that he won't necessarily see time on offense, but I just don't think they want to throw in someone who is, in general, inexperienced in the NFL and also very inexperienced with their offense.

Arif: A lot of South Dakota State guys on this roster.

Jason: Correct me if I'm wrong — North Dakota State is the one that you have, like, declared a blood feud with, correct?

Arif: Correct. I’m a Jackrabbits fan by circumstance and proxy.

Jason: So this is a positive development. That’s all I needed to know.

Arif: Correct.

Wide Receivers and Potential

Arif: So, the Packers lost something like 1800 receiving yards, or at least half of their receiving yards. A little bit due to injury, like Luke Musgrave, but a lot of it due to free agency — I mean, [Romeo] Doubs, Dontayvion Wicks. What is the expectation for Christian Watson and Matthew Golden? Matthew Golden had, I think, 360 or so receiving yards last year — certainly not at least 400. And Christian Watson — correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe he's had more than 700 in a single season.

Jason: Sounds about right. I don't have the numbers staring me in the face, but it's like between 600 and 750, somewhere in that range is his single-season high, if I recall correctly.

[Editor’s Note: His career high in total receiving yardage in the regular season is 620]

Arif: Right, and so with that in mind, especially given Matthew Golden's pedigree as a first-round pick, Christian Watson recently signing a pretty nice-looking contract for him… What is the expectation that that receiving group can actually — not that like Romeo Doubs is setting the world on fire — live up to the amount of replacement snaps necessary to make this like a fully-fledged offense?

Jason: So the other person you didn't mention in that, though he's not technically a wide receiver, is Tucker Kraft, right? And he missed over half of last season and is now coming back. By all signals, he is going to be full send from the jump this season. So that's going to be part of that formula too.

In terms of the wideouts, though, it is interesting because prior to the Josh Jacobs de facto suspension with the commissioners’ exempt list, there was reason to believe that the Packers were still going to be some version of the offense they were in the past. Insofar as the run rates in neutral or early downs, things like that.

Well, with Josh Jacobs not available for the foreseeable future, it does actually make you wonder: Do the Packers have to recalibrate those elements of the offense? Those could come in a variety of forms, but maybe you just have to pass more because you can't just give MarShawn Lloyd and Kaleb Johnson and Pierre Strong Jr. and Chris Brooks, you know, the kind of workload you would have given Josh Jacobs and friends in previous seasons.

I bring that up to say there might be more passing volume or passing opportunities for a player like Christian Watson and a player like Matthew Golden than the predecessor here, Romeo Doubs, didn't have. The Packers were not a team that actually passed a lot just in terms of total volume. They were one of the slowest-paced offenses in the NFL. It was very efficient, but there just weren't that many plays, whether by design or otherwise.

I wonder if that's something that, in general, is going to have to take into account for that change in the backfield. And if that ticks up, does that push Christian Watson to having to flirting with 1000 yards, let's say, health permitting, that certainly seems possible. After he came back in 2025, he was one of the most down-to-down effective receivers in the NFL, and you know that again, it's a Christian Watson stat, so it obviously has to come with caveats. But that still matters.

Like, over the second half of the season, there were not a ton of receivers that were that much more effective than Christian Watson was. And there's also this scenario that I think the Packers are betting on, independent of how exactly they get to it. When you have Watson or a receiver like that on the boundary, it forces defenses to approach you in a variety of ways in terms of the coverage because you can't just let that guy get behind you. It's game over if that happens.

Well, if you're already accounting for what Christian Watson can do deep down the field, you know [with] Tucker Kraft you [can] spit the ball out to him, and he's a first down automatically, which is statistically basically true.

Well, then how is that opposing defense? Do you defend against that? Well, you can get to the quarterback, but if the quarterback is getting the ball out too quickly for you to get to him, maybe there's just not an easy solution to that. So it doesn't mean the Packers' offense is going to be automatically what it was the past few seasons, where it was, I think, by DVOA, it was like six and four and six in terms of its regular-season finishes.

But they do have a lot of answers there. That's before you even get to someone like Matthew Golden. In the case of Golden, he did not have a big role as a rookie, and there was a period in the middle of the year where that was due to injury. If memory serves me correctly, he was dealing with, I think it was like a shoulder and maybe like a wrist or a hand injury.

[Editor’s Note: Shoulder injury, suffered in Week 9 vs. Carolina, and a wrist injury that appeared two weeks later]

But outside of that, they drafted him to essentially be their answer against man coverage, and then Romeo Doubs kind of just developed into that guy in 2025. Not that Doubs, as you put it, is a world beater, but he was good enough that it just made sense to leave that guy out here. He's actually resolving the issue that the offense had in 2024.

The Green Bay Packers Defense

Switching Defensive Coordinators

Arif: I think we can switch to the other side of the ball. I think that the primary question for me — I know you know personnel questions are important — but [the primary question] is what losing Jeff Hafley means and what gaining Jonathan Gannon means as the Packers' defensive coordinator?

We know both are fairly zone-heavy; they don't blitz a ton relative to the rest of the league. So stylistically, it feels like there are some similarities, but also they have different ways that they approach safety rotations, what coverages that they favor, and Gannon as a DC is used to having a pretty deep pressure package to rely on along the defensive line, which, frankly, Green Bay doesn't seem to have.

So what are kind of the challenges and changes that you expect with Gannon in as DC, and is this a concern losing Hafley so soon after finally finding a defensive coordinator Packers fans actually like?

Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Every week this season, I’ll be breaking down the key performances from draftable prospects across the country. With Week 1 tape study complete, here are my thoughts and takeaways. I’ve grouped each player into tiers based on how I rated their performance.

Table of Contents

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Elite

After two years at left tackle, Anthonie Knapp made his first career start at left guard and had the best individual performance of the week. He entered the season as a top-40 player on my board but is rapidly ascending to a strong first-round grade.

Knapp played with excellent hand placement and strike timing in pass pro, producing teach tape-caliber reps with a wide range of techniques. He used the flash-bait to draw out moves prematurely before clamping his opponent with a firm punch. Knapp’s heavy hands and elite grip strength allow him to end reps on first contact. His independent hand usage is top-tier, and he could have won most of his reps with one hand tied behind his back.

The biggest negative to his game was referee error; Knapp was incorrectly penalized for using a snatch-trap. He got his outside edge pried open once by a long-arm, but his anchor was incredibly sturdy for the most part. He has the hip-sink and ankle flexion to curb speed-to-power and uses upward strikes to lift his opponent’s pads and create leverage. When he didn’t have a one-on-one matchup, he looked for work and helped out his teammates.

Knapp was equally dominant in the run game, clearing out enormous lanes on stretch/wide zone. He has exceptional torque as a zone blocker to uproot defenders or leverage them out of gaps. He took a perfect angle to the second level and sprung an explosive run. His nasty demeanor was on full display, and he routinely finished blocks in both phases.

Darian Mensah posted a nearly flawless stat line (27/30, 400 yds, 5 TD, 0 INT) vs. Stanford, establishing himself as a Heisman frontrunner and potential first-round pick. Because of his lack of arm talent and athleticism, I’m still skeptical of his NFL upside, but if he maintains this level of play against better competition, I’ll be forced to reconsider.

He threw with good timing and anticipation, although it wasn’t hard to anticipate Malachi Toney getting open on sail routes vs. single coverage. His touch and ball placement were excellent, and he repeatedly delivered while taking a hit. He didn't have to move off of his first read very often, and Stanford refused to deviate from their questionable strategy of playing man coverage every snap.

In just 28 snaps, Francis Brewu recorded four pressures, a sack, and two run stops. I expect his playing time to increase, as he’s clearly Notre Dame’s most talented and impactful interior defender. He launches out of his stance and crosses the guard’s face in a blur. He has the burst to win the outside track from a 1-tech alignment and the arc speed and bend to finish quick wins.

He’s a skilled hand-fighter with a clean rip move to clear the edge. When a blocker makes early contact, he uses a push-pull to soften his grip & disengage. He usually had run-first responsibilities but was able to transition to counters and apply late pressure. His secondary moves are instinctive and precisely executed. While he has rare juice as a speed rusher, he didn’t show much of a power profile in this game.

At 280 lbs, Brewu will be physically outmatched on early downs at the next level. However, his Week 1 run defense tape was outstanding. He beat a double team with a textbook corkscrew technique and made a stop for a short gain. On this rep (play #3 in the cutup), he dropped his post leg and hit an absurd shin angle, allowing him to establish leverage and withstand the combo.

Great

Arch Manning was very crisp in Week 1, which should be expected against G5 competition. The most encouraging aspect of his performance was how consistent his footwork and mechanics looked compared to last season. His ball placement was sharp at every level of the field, and he didn’t have any technical lapses that caused him to spray easy passes.

While he made a few tough throws under pressure, he usually had plenty of time in the pocket and was able to focus solely on execution. It’s critical that he maintains this improvement against better competition with fiercer pass rushes. He stared down a Stick Nod and threw a rough interception in the red zone, but corrected this later in the game, using his eyes to manipulate the split safety and create space for the in-breaker.

Deuce Alexander posted his first 100-yard receiving performance vs. Louisville, catching two 62-yard touchdowns and establishing himself as one of the most dangerous vertical threats in college football. He has elite speed and acceleration to stack man coverage or burn pursuit angles after the catch.

On his first touchdown, he caught a deep over, instantly hit the jets, and left multiple defenders in the dust. A couple of drives later, he burned press-man down the sideline and tracked the ball over his shoulder for his second score. He used a filthy rocker step to uncover on a deep post but wasn’t targeted. His route tree consists almost entirely of verticals and stops. He understands how to attack blind spots vs. Cover-3 corners, but occasionally stumbles when attempting to sharply decelerate.

I wasn’t impressed by D.J. McKinney’s Colorado tape, but he’ll convert me into a believer with a few more performances like this. McKinney excelled in press-man, off-man, and zone coverage. He has a firm punch and patient footwork at the line of scrimmage, and his light backpedal and easy vertical transitions allow him to match the entire route tree from depth.

He read and played a post/wheel concept perfectly, carrying #1 vertical, driving on the wheel from #2, and breaking up the pass. He also got a pick-six on an overthrown stop route, which was more of an offensive error than great defensive play.

Good

Oregon had another sloppy season opener, but Dante Moore wasn’t the problem. His ball velocity seems to have improved from last season, as stop routes from the far hash arrived a beat earlier. He identified a Cover-3 rotation, held the safety with his eyes, and hit Jamari Johnson down the seam for a touchdown, but sprayed another seam touchdown opportunity near the red zone.

He made an accurate throw down the deep sideline and hit a wheel route in a tight window with perfect ball placement. He was late to progress to a backside dig and missed the open window, resulting in an incompletion.

Chambliss’ Week 1 performance was a tale of two halves. After a rocky start, he eventually found his footing and willed his team to victory. For a 5117 quarterback [Editor’s Note: this means 5’11⅞”], he has a rare ability to see and attack the middle of the field. Early in the game, however, his anticipation and spatial awareness were lacking. He misjudged the linebacker’s angle and telegraphed a deep stop, resulting in an interception. He also got away with an interceptable pass on a Sail concept.

But in the second half, Chambliss did a much better job using his eyes to manipulate underneath zone defenders and hit several impressive backside digs. As per usual, he generated enough zip to hit curls and out-breakers from the far hash. He threw with consistent ball placement down the seam and deep sideline but sprayed a couple of short/intermediate throws. He also showed his elite escapability against a talented group of edge rushers. He ran the ball well but lost a fumble on QB power.

I didn’t watch Amare Thomas over the summer, but he made a great first impression in Week 1, recording eight receptions, 133 yards, and a touchdown. He made a spectacular contested catch on a slot fade, working back to the ball through contact. But he also dropped a pass that could have easily resulted in an interception.

His contact balance, creativity, and reactive athleticism make him difficult to bring down after the catch. He bounces off of tackle attempts, spins away from reckless pursuit angles, and stiff-arms smaller defenders in the flat. His route running is unrefined, plagued by rounded cuts, inefficient footwork, and a poor feel for setting up his breaks. However, he has decent lateral quickness and could develop into a capable intermediate separator with more technical polish. Against zone, Thomas showed very good coverage IQ and spatial awareness. He’s also a physical run blocker who can be trusted at the point of attack.

A former five-star recruit, Samson Okunlola wasn’t able to crack the starting lineup until his fourth year at Miami. He played 493 snaps in 2025 as a rotational guard, and his drive power and anchor caught my attention. But his first career start at left tackle was eye-opening, and it’s easy to envision him playing his way into the first round.

Okunlola has rare foot speed for a 330-lbs tackle. His pass sets are explosive and repeatable, and he reaches his set points with time to read the opponent’s move and brace for contact. He showed the ability to open his hips and expand his set points, but I’ll need to verify his pocket range against better competition, as Stanford has one of the most juiceless edge rotations in the Power-4. He also has adequate slide quickness to redirect with inside moves, and he pairs that with a heavy but precise outside hand punch and arresting grip strength to stay connected through counter moves, though he needs to refine his scattershot inside hand placement.

He didn't create as much displacement off the line of scrimmage as he did last year and got stood up on the frontside of wide zone several times. But he used his powerful upper body to uproot edge defenders and widen the B-gap when he couldn’t drive them with his legs. He launches smaller targets into orbit when he connects, but whiffed on a few blocks in open space.

I was very impressed with Boubacar Traore’s Week 1 tape. He looks stronger and more athletic than he did last year, and his pass-rush plan was noticeably more refined. He recorded seven pass-rush wins with a variety of moves, including a cross-chop, hook-rip, and long-arm. He also dusted the right tackle with his signature outside spin.

He tried this move a second time but didn't present a convincing enough threat towards the B-gap to shorten the corner. He attacks run blocks with heavy hands and has a stingy anchor at the point of attack. He made an incredible one-armed TFL while being held. He beat a double team but missed the tackle in the backfield.

Buy Jordan Ross stock while you still can. As a rotational player at Tennessee, Ross flashed the athletic traits that made him a five-star recruit. But in his first career start, he confirmed that he should be taken seriously as a top-50 prospect. He got a pick-six dropping into zone coverage and looked like an off-ball linebacker on his way to the end zone.

Ross further showcased his elite athleticism through his closing burst on an unblocked sack and TFL. He won the outside track cleanly with a cross-chop and beat the right tackle with a long-arm, but struggled to push the left side of the pocket. Adding weight will be critical for the next level, though he had an impressive stack-and-shed rep vs. a tight end.

E.J. Lightsey doesn’t have much hype at this point, but I’m intrigued by the upside he showed in Week 1. He has thunderous hands to jolt blockers and shed cleanly. He’s patient and disciplined, avoiding false steps or overpursuit, but his eyes are underdeveloped, and he was at times a beat late to key and trigger.

Matt Rose was one of the few Stanford defenders who looked like he belonged on the field with Miami. He keys and triggers quickly in the run game, and has a good feel for weaving or slipping around blocks. While he didn’t have any direct take-on reps in this game, he diagnosed quickly enough to stay ahead of the block development.

Aside from two missed tackles, Rose had a very strong performance in run support and was a major reason Miami struggled to move the ball on the ground. He ran with Cooper Barkate on a deep over, maintaining leverage all the way to the sideline. He needs to speed up his reaction to slide/flat routes, however.

TJ Dottery stuffed the stat sheet in Week 1, recording three stops, five pressures, and a pass breakup. He abruptly identifies the blocking scheme, fits his gap in run support, and has a relentless motor and very good pursuit speed from the backside.

But he wasn't asked to take on many blocks, and might struggle to play through contact at 228 lbs. For the most part, he plays with good spacing and leverage in his zone drops, though he abandoned the hook-curl when the quarterback broke the pocket and would've allowed a third-down conversion if the throw was accurate. He picked up and leveraged a deep over perfectly in zone coverage but dropped the interception. Most of his pressures were unblocked, but he got a clean win vs. Clemson’s right guard with a euro-step crossover.

Over the summer, I viewed Leonard Moore as a nearly perfect cornerback prospect, with tackling and run defense as his only minor weaknesses. But he seems to have identified and addressed those issues over the offseason. This was the best run-support performance of his career. He had a career-high four stop tackles and played with more physicality and discipline than I’ve seen from him.

He broke up a back shoulder fade and almost came down with a spectacular interception. The fake jam remains an effective changeup in press-man, letting him disrupt the timing of the release without overextending. He played with good eye discipline vs. play action, staying connected to his assignment rather than biting on the play fake. But he struggled to match stop routes and decelerate without losing his footing.

Above Average

We have a massive college football conspiracy on our hands.

The Wolverines, in danger of losing to a Western Michigan team they were supposed to beat by four touchdowns, chucked up a Hail Mary. It may be the most scrutinized play in football this decade.

Log on to any social media, and you’ll find countless people posting screenshots, comparisons, frame-by-frame analyses and claims of expertise. The “Bail Mary”, as it has come to be known, has broken the Zapruder barrier. It’s getting the same treatment as the Holy Roller or Tuck Rule. 

Outside of draft analysis, my engagement with football is exclusive to the pros. I’m certainly not a Michigan fan, nor am I a Michigan anti-fan. I have no dog in this fight. Honestly, I find both sides of Michigan-based discourse annoying. I kind of hope a meteor takes us all out before we talk too much more about Connor Stallions or Dave Portnoy. 

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And yet, I am absolutely fascinated by this clock operation situation. We suddenly have the nation learning in real time about clock operation rules, video conversion methods, frame rates, monitor refresh rates, scoreboard brands and TV synchronization. 

I can’t help myself. I have to deep-dive into this. Please send help to my location.

[Editor’s Note: If you see Luke crashing out about football, do not intervene. He is exactly where he wants to be.]

Table of Contents

The Blow-by-Blow

So let’s go over the facts of the case. Prior to Michigan’s first Hail Mary attempt, Michigan spiked the ball on 1st and 10. Head referee Jim Wharrie ruled that nine seconds remained on the game clock and had the clock operator reset the clock to that number. That is an important detail, as the scoreboard operation does not deal in decimals (more on that later). No fractions of a second to consider.

On 2nd & 10, Bryce Underwood heaved a prayer to the back of the end zone, where safety Micah Davis batted it to the ground. As Davis stepped out of bounds prior to jumping for the ball, the play was dead the instant the ball touched him.

Upon review, the officials determined that dead-ball moment happened with one second remaining. They put one second back on the clock and lined up for a final down. This time, Underwood found J.J. Buchanan in the front of the end zone for the walk-off touchdown.

Twitter tweet

After the game, despite protests from the NBC broadcast, the Big Ten released a statement justifying the call.

Twitter tweet

The MAC has accepted this explanation, ensuring that no further action will be taken. 

But that won’t stop it from being one of the biggest topics of the week. It puts a ton of scrutiny on the Big Ten’s process for determining game time, tracking it, and applying it to their replay process. Did the Big Ten fabricate evidence to cover their asses? Were sportsbooks involved? Prediction markets?

How Do Clocks Work?

According to the Big Ten’s statement, the entire roster of camera feeds is synchronized using a strobe system. That is ostensibly an external reference system: show all of the cameras a quick flash so they have a clear reference to anchor their synchronization.

One of those cameras is pointed directly at the game clock. The game clock is purportedly used by broadcasts when examining delicate timing matters like this, and is also what is used by replay officials.

Chase Snyder, a CBS Sports production assistant and Houston-area play-by-play announcer, showed one such camera from a different event.

Twitter tweet

The score bug, however, does not rely on this visual information. In the older broadcast days, they’d simply overlay the clock on the score bug. 

Ah, heck, watch the rest of the Miracle at the Met. It’s good for you.

Anyways, at a certain point, broadcast networks embraced full-score bugs. In doing so, they found ways to get reliable score and clock data directly from the official scoreboard, rather than having to point a camera at the ugly numbers. This NFL Throwback documentary breaks it down.

Score bugs are now wired directly into scoreboards, but can still be unreliable. Between broadcast delay, graphics rendering, and just general technological unreliability, it’s absolutely possible that the score bug slipped out of sync at some point. In fact, it took just one more day for a broadcast’s replay system to fall out of sync.

When the clock operator reset the clock to 9 seconds at the start of the 2nd-down play, however, any desynchronization would necessarily be fixed. The scoreboard, official game clock and TV broadcast were all set to exactly nine seconds. 

In fact, that’s key to the argument that one former Michigan staffer, whom I’m sure everyone wants to hear from on this, made:

Twitter tweet

That’s not how that works, however. According to this explanation from a scoreboard operator, there are two different kinds of scoreboard: decimal and absolute. You might see a decimal scoreboard in a basketball game, for example, using tenths and even hundredths of a second.

Michigan uses an absolute value scoreboard. So that extra 0.99 seconds that Stallions is referring to, which would be sufficient to claim that there was time left on the clock, would have elapsed before the 4th quarter moved from 15:00 to 14:59. 

That means we are working with eight seconds of game time, not nine. That is remarkably confusing and counterintuitive, but if we’re trying to determine if Big Ten officials were correct to put more time on the clock, we’ll have to work with that.

Editor’s Note: I know Luke’s argument is weird, but if the clock is switching over from 0:09 to 0:08 immediately, then the full length of only eight seconds will play out before the clock displays 0:00 — this chart hopefully helps demonstrate. There are only eight segments between 8.00001 seconds (0:09 on the clock) and 0:00 on the clock.

0:00 is the key moment. The problem is, we don’t have a camera angle that shows this play with the scoreboard clock in frame. So we have to rely on the synchronization of multiple cameras, superimposing the clock onto the play. That is where the issue is supposed to be.

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How Do Clocks Synchronize?

This system is remarkably reliable, which is why Terry McAulay was adamant that the clock is synced.

I suppose it's plausible that a glitch could cause the TV graphic to go out of sync over the last nine seconds, thus displaying the wrong time. Simply taking a screenshot like this won’t be sufficient.

That slightly disturbed group of pixels is the ball. A lot of this is going to be like that, thanks to bitrates, conversions, and re-uploads.

The broadcast then used a different clock feed — an old-school cropped overlay of the stadium clock. This is what NBC’s producer confirmed was in sync. Either the producer was wrong, or the wrong call was made.

The Big Ten's official stance is that the producer was wrong. 

Roughly the same point on the Big Ten’s official release.

Attached to the Big Ten’s official statement was the release of the internal officiating conversation, including the above screenshot. That is a direct shot of the scoreboard at Michigan Stadium, as evidenced by the statistical display to the right of the clock.

Per the Big Ten’s release, their clock was twelve or so frames behind NBC’s, or ⅕ of a second. That was enough to make the difference.

When the Minnesota Vikings took Caleb Banks 18th overall, I was live with Arif and several other regulars on the Locked On Network. I made this face:

That was probably a little harsh, considering how I only really understood the surface level of Banks before the draft. I knew he was considered a second-round prospect by the consensus board, and that his injury history was a major part of his evaluation. 

Rob Brzezinski, acting as GM for the draft, defended the pick by hyperbolizing praise for the Vikings’ medical staff and portraying the pick as a no-brainer.

Twitter tweet

Twitter tweet

Despite Brzezinski’s protests, the pick was widely decried as a reach, due in no small part to a near-unanimous national expectation that the Vikings would take Dillon Thieneman, who instead went to the Bears. That was my read too — a second-round prospect taken in the first. That’s bad business.

Whether I agree or disagree, the Vikings were apparently comfortable with that kind of investment in that kind of player. So it doesn’t quite track that, for whatever Tony Pauline’s reporting is worth to you, some in the building already have buyer’s remorse.

Hindsight is 20/20, but here hindsight might be 20/15. Caleb Banks is struggling on the field, and getting outplayed by a teammate drafted 64 picks later, evoking the haunted specter of Andrew Booth and Akayleb Evans.

But no worry, according to Banks, who admitted he was out of shape after his home debut — a result of two years of on-and-off injury rehab. He’ll get the rust knocked off, and things will shore up.

But is that a valid excuse? Can we chalk up Banks’ struggles to a conditioning issue, and pencil him in as that high-potential superstar down the road? Or is something else causing his struggles? Something more permanent?

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Even if he has only been struggling as a result of conditioning, that’s hardly exculpatory for the Vikings. Even if the “best doctors in the world” can keep Banks healthy, knowingly selecting a player that can’t play his first year because of his conditioning is damning in its own right. 

Damning the Vikings over the 2026 draft is a moot point, however, as Rob Brzezinski won’t be at the helm anymore. Nolan Teasley is in charge and is not beholden to Brzezinski’s vision.

But Brian Flores, whom many saw as the real mastermind behind the draft, is still in the room, and may have sway in the front office. Much of the rank-and-file draft operation is intact.

So it’s still a fruitful exercise to ask the original question: is Caleb Banks really struggling that bad? And will it get better if he’s more well-conditioned? That is to say, should we panic in spite of all of these excuses?

Is Banks Out Of Shape? As Told By A Guy In Bad Shape

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That’s kind of the elephant in the room, isn’t it? How can we, as random laypeople, judge the kind of shape someone like Banks is in? That’s why I usually wouldn’t touch this kind of talker — I’ll only acknowledge its validity now because Banks confirmed it himself. You’re not taking my word for it, nor should you.

So perhaps it can explain the rash of plays from this preseason that feature Banks getting pushed back, washed aside, and generally dominated.

Banks participated for the entirety of training camp, so is his injury a valid excuse for his conditioning? It’s not possible for us to gather enough evidence about his rehab processes at Florida to do anything more than speculate, but for what it’s worth, we do see high effort from Banks when relevant.

Here, Banks has to pursue a scrambling Tyler Huntley and chase him down. Note that Banks takes a nearly flat angle, cutting Huntley off and limiting the gain (which was called back due to penalty anyway).

If we’re going to wade into the speculative territory of effort and work ethic, we need to acknowledge reps like this, where a defender pursues from the backside and chases down the play. Not to mention the 5.04 speed at play, which Banks ran before his foot had fully healed.

Banks’ conditioning may be impacting his explosiveness, although that's not supposed to be his strength.  Instead, he is a player who wins with upper body strength and strong finish. So he can win with swim moves like this:

The opposite would be a build like Dallas Turner’s, who wins with a lot of explosiveness right at the snap, but can get stopped up later in the rep without any way out of the grip of a stronger tackle.

So with the understanding that Banks is a tall, top-down athlete, it makes sense that he would get out-leveraged sometimes. That is to say, I’m not comfortable chalking up his struggles entirely to poor conditioning. Some of this is baked in the cake.

Photo by Bailey Hillesheim/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

It’s roster cutdown day, and the Vikings have come up with their initial 53-man roster. The team announced the roster on its official website; we’ve listed the roster below.

How does each player stack up? I’ve ranked every player on the initial 53-man roster (plus some bonus players!) and tiered them into groups. I have a highlight from every player as well [Author’s Note: I made sure the highlight was different from my beginning-of-camp prediction, with the exception of Andrew DePaola; sorry, long snapper highlights are hard!].

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53-Man Roster

QBs: Kyler Murray, JJ McCarthy, Carson Wentz, Max Brosmer

RBs: Aaron Jones, Jordan Mason, Demond Claiborne, Max Bredeson

WRs: Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison, Jauan Jennings, Myles Price, Tai Felton, Dillon Bell

TEs: TJ Hockenson, Josh Oliver, Gavin Bartholomew, Ben Yurosek

OT: Christian Darrisaw, Brian O’Neill, Ryan Van Demark, Caleb Tiernan

IOL: Donovan Jackson, Blake Brandel, Will Fries, Joe Huber

IDL: Jalen Redmond, Caleb Banks, Domonique Orange, Levi Drake Rodriguez, Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins, Elijah Williams

EDGE: Dallas Turner, Andrew Van Ginkel, Tyler Batty, Bo Richter

LB: Blake Cashman, Eric Wilson, Ivan Pace Jr., Jake Golday, Chaz Chambliss

CB: Byron Murphy, Isaiah Rodgers, James Pierre, Chuck Demmings

S: Josh Metellus, Theo Jackson, Jay Ward, Jakobe Thomas, Jacob Thomas

ST: Will Reichard, Brett Thorson, Andrew DePaola

Player Rankings

I put the roster above into a chart where you can see how I rank the players, with color-coding for each player's tier.

Full image here

Now, let’s dive into the tiers

Special

Justin Jefferson is clearly the best player on the Vikings, and a truly special NFL player. One of the best players in the league, Jefferson recently talked about how, after a down year, he’s no longer considered by many to be the best WR in the NFL. With that motivation, I expect him to have an incredible 2026.

This pair of plays is what makes Jefferson great. In 2023, he made an insane effort to recover a loose ball and then followed it up with what was, in my opinion, the second best catch of his career against the Lions to convert the third down, all while the team was down by multiple scores in the middle of a losing streak. 

He’s built different.

All-Pro Caliber

None. The Vikings have a few really good players behind Jefferson, but no other position player on the roster has actually received a First-Team All-Pro selection. I don’t necessarily see that changing this year.

Pro Bowl Caliber

Christian Darrisaw has never actually made a Pro Bowl, but at his peak he’s been one of the best LTs in the NFL. Darrisaw’s 2025 season was marred by injury as he struggled to recover from a devastating knee injury he suffered in 2024. Reports say he’s fully healthy, and hopefully he’s ready to climb back towards the peak of the LT position in 2026.

Andrew Van Ginkel fits like a glove in defensive coordinator Brian Flores’ defense, and his ability to rush the passer, play against the run, and play in coverage — particularly with his skill anticipating screens — is like no one else in the NFL. He missed some time last year and is on the wrong side of 30, but I expect him to play at a high level this season.

Byron Murphy Jr. can at times feel like the forgotten man on the Vikings' roster. Despite being on a large contract, I don’t think he gets a lot of love from the fanbase. He’s a very capable man corner, but his true value lies in his versatility. He’s able to play inside and out in the Vikings defense, and is moved around in a wide variety of spots with Flores’ funky coverages. He’s also really aggressive playing screens and against the run from the edge of the defense, the perfect mentality for a CB.

Brian O’Neill has a new extension and is returning as an elder statesman, the longest-tenured Viking. O’Neill has been a stalwart player at right tackle for the team since he was drafted in 2018. He is a very smart, technically sound player who is still a good athlete and a fringe top 5 RT. He’s had some minor injuries in recent years and doesn’t have the best anchor in the world, but he’s still a fine player who could make the Pro Bowl in any given year.

Pro Bowl Potential

Jalen Redmond has ascended from a UFL player to one of the Vikings’ best players. Uncommonly quick, Redmond wreaks havoc in opposing backfields. He’s great at the slashing movements required by Flores’ defense, and stout enough to directly take on blocks. Redmond played nearly 800 snaps last year, and he should again. If variance can give him just a little bit more sack production, I believe he can earn Pro Bowl honors this year.

Dallas Turner, entering his third year, is slated for a larger role with the Vikings after the team moved on from Jonathan Greenard this past offseason. Turner was productive with Greenard out of the lineup last year, and the former first-round pick is a devastatingly explosive athlete. It appears that Turner has also added strength this offseason, and hopefully pass-rush moves to elevate his game to be among the best edge rushers in the NFL. Training camp reports and an impressive preseason drive against the Giants are adding to the hype.

Jordan Addison is entering his 4th season hoping to prove he’s worth a large extension. The Vikings picked up his 5th-year option this offseason, so he’s on the team for at least two more years, but he’s still looking for his first 1,000-yard season. Addison is a great route runner and effective deep threat who complements Jefferson and has impressive play strength for his size.

Kyler Murray handily won the QB competition he was in against J.J. McCarthy this offseason, and will start for the Vikings. At his best, Kyler is an electric playmaker who can make every throw and demolish defenses with his legs. We didn’t get to see much of Kyler in preseason, with just one drive and three pass attempts, but if Kyler can execute, the Vikings’ offensive environment will allow him to thrive. If not, I have a feeling that many people in the organization will be looking for new jobs.

TJ Hockenson had to take a pay cut this offseason and is now slated to become a free agent in 2027. He’s had a down couple of years after a brutal knee injury in 2023, but I think he’s still a really good player. Hockenson is a good in-line blocker with the ability to stretch the seam as a pass catcher, which is a very rare combination for a TE. He’s also a safety blanket who often gets open underneath and makes tough catches. Kyler loved Trey McBride in Arizona, so Hockenson may be in for a resurgent season.

Blake Cashman at his best looks like a dominant linebacker. He has great athleticism and coverage instincts, and is violent coming forward against the run and as a blitzer. He seems to frequently be dealing with injuries, and was a little inconsistent in 2025. If he can stay healthy, he’s an important piece in the middle of the Vikings’ defense.

Quality Starters

Josh Metellus, for me, epitomizes the phrase “quality starter.” He’s a quality player, and [Author’s note: I apologize for constantly referring to Vikings defenders as versatile, but it’s true] executes a variety of tasks in Flores’ defense. Metellus isn’t great at any one thing, but he’s good at just about everything, from playing man coverage against RBs and TEs, to playing deep safety and underneath zones, to defending the run from the box or from depth, to blitzing. He’s also a team leader. His wide-ranging role makes him hard to place on an awards ballot, and he may never make a Pro Bowl, but he’s still an excellent player in the Vikings’ defense.

Jauan Jennings was a great offseason addition as the Vikings’ WR3. We didn’t get to see a ton from him in preseason, as he sat most of it like the other starters, but he adds a top-level blocking presence at the WR position. He’s also a reliable pass catcher with a knack for getting open with route running and converting third downs.

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Aaron Jones is on the wrong side of 30 and has dealt with a number of injuries throughout his career. I think he’s still a really good RB who always makes the right choices running the ball, is an effective receiver, and is a very good pass protector. He also still has some explosiveness in his legs. He won’t be the best RB in the NFL, but he will be effective as part of the rotation.

Jordan Mason is the player that Jones will primarily be rotating with. Mason was a rugged back who was great in short yardage last year, but lacks an explosive element to his game. Mason reportedly slimmed down to add explosiveness, but even if he’s not able to break big runs, he’s really consistent as a runner between the tackles. He doesn’t add much as a pass protector or catcher, but he’s another starting-level RB alongside Jones.

Eric Wilson broke out as a 31-year-old in 2025, finally finding a home in the Brian Flores defense. He was a missile pointed towards the line of scrimmage and a dominant blitzer who remained sound in coverage. He was rewarded with a nice contract this offseason, and should be a solid starter again in 2026.

Donovan Jackson started at left guard last year as a rookie, and had a tumultuous season with constant change around him at the left tackle and center spots. He had some struggles and was ultimately a below-average starter at the position. I’m betting that with an NFL offseason, recovery from a broken wrist, and hopefully more consistent play around him in 2026, Jackson will take a step forward and become a solid starter.

All-Pro Specialists

Will Reichard was the best kicker in football in 2025. With a new holder in 2026, hopefully everything is the same for Reichard, and he did successfully boot two 50+ yard FGs in the preseason.

Andrew DePaola is the Vikings’ other All-Pro specialist, and has been at the top of the list of NFL long snappers for years now.  I don’t know if it’s rude to rank him and Reichard this low overall when compared to the rest of the roster, but I think right below the quality starters is a fair spot to put them.

Fringe Starters

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

The Minnesota Vikings’ second-round pick, LB Jake Golday, has gotten to play a lot over the last two preseason games with the second team. In college at Cincinnati, Golday played a role that’s prevalent at that level but not in the NFL, playing outside the box and often blitzing from a very wide angle.

He played in coverage and had some traditional LB reps as well, but it was generally recognized that he would need to adapt to the NFL game. As a player who is a lock to make the roster, Golday probably won’t play against the Denver Broncos in preseason week three, but he got extensive run against the New York Giants and Baltimore Ravens.

That tape will help us see how Golday is transitioning to the NFL game and what role the Vikings are actually asking him to play. Let’s dive in.

Defining the Vikings’ Linebacker Roles

Because of his college role and Brian Flores’ unique scheme, Vikings fans generated quite a bit of discussion this offseason over the role Golday would play in the Vikings’ defense. Two players, Andrew Van Ginkel and Eric Wilson, were generally used as reference points for the roles. To define the archetypes a little bit, Van Ginkel is primarily an edge rusher who moonlights as an off-ball linebacker, while Wilson played last year as a linebacker, but often blitzed and saw some snaps lined up on the edge as well.

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As a prospect, Golday was pretty frequently compared to Van Ginkel, who really had very similar measurements and testing as a prospect, as well as the college flexibility to rush the passer and play coverage [Author’s note: and, let’s be honest, the comparisons also probably happened because they’re both white]. 

In terms of role on the Vikings, analysts like Arif, Luke, and Tyler Forness projected Golday to play more of a Wilson-esque role, primarily being an off-ball LB while still blitzing often and occasionally lining up on the edge. I personally expected Golday to be more of an understudy to Van Ginkel, and projected him as an edge rusher in my 53-man roster projection.

Watching the preseason games live, my impression was that Golday played off the ball against the Giants and more of an edge position against the Ravens. Going through the tape, it became clear that the Vikings asked Golday and fellow LB Chaz Chambliss to flip their roles between the two games, but against the Ravens, Golday reverted to his Week 1 role when Chambliss came off the field in Nickel packages.

Jake Golday’s alignment at the snap, per TruMedia

The tape helps define those roles, and we can start by looking at the Vikings’ first team defense. They only played three snaps together against the Giants, and Van Ginkel came off the field after the Giants got a first down. Still, those plays matched what the second team defense did.

On the play below, you can see a typical alignment for the Vikings. They have four players — Dallas Turner, Jalen Redmond, Levi Drake Rodriguez, and Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins, from left to right — with their hands in the dirt. 

Further right of Ingram-Dawkins is Van Ginkel, who aligns towards the slot receiver initially but shuffles towards the line of scrimmage. Blake Cashman and Eric Wilson are off-ball LBs.

From the end zone angle, you can see the relative positions of the defenders. Turner is a 7-technique, outside the shoulder of the TE, Redmond is a three-technique, outside the shoulder of the right guard, Rodriguez is a one-technique, outside the shoulder of the center, and Ingram-Dawkins is a 4i, on the inside shoulder of the left tackle. If anything, Van Ginkel could be considered a Wide 9, way outside any blocker.

Really, though, this is what the below playbook, from Bill Belichick’s 1997 Jets defense, calls an “Over” front. Based on this diagram, Van Ginkel is the Will, Cashman is the Mike, and Wilson is the Sam. 

As always, no playbook examples are clean, but this best approximates the point. 

The way defenses set their “strength” can vary, particularly between the run and the pass. Typically, the “run strength” is to the TE, and the “passing strength” is where there are more receiving threats. Often they are the same side, but that’s not always the case. 

If following that convention, the play above would have a run strength to the defense’s left and a passing strength to the right, because the TE and FB are offset to the defense’s left and there are two receivers right. 

Usually you name the players based on the run strength, not the passing strength, so that’s why I’m calling Van Ginkel as Will on this play. The Vikings may be taking an alternate approach and setting the defense based on the ball location, but that’s immaterial at the moment.

The next play shows a different offensive look, but a similar defensive look. This time, the Offense has the TE lined up to their left, but the Vikings players are in similar positions.

This time, they’re in an “Under” front, where Van Ginkel is the Sam and Wilson is the Will.

As mentioned before, the real key is to look at where the ball is. It’s on the right hash. That means that Van Ginkel is aligned to the “field” and Wilson is aligned to the “boundary.”

If you go through the Giants game, you can see that Golday is consistently lined up on the boundary side of the formation, off the ball (the “Wilson” role, an off-ball Will), while Chambliss is lined up on the ball to the field side (the “Van Ginkel” role, an on-ball Sam). In the Ravens game, those roles flipped, and Golday played on the ball to the field as a Sam, while Chambliss played off ball to the boundary as a Will. 

As an aside, whenever Golday and Chambliss were on the ball, they had a defensive line body aligned at 4i or wider inside. This occupied the attention of the tackle, and meant that the players were truly playing an on-ball LB role, and not an edge rusher role. I think it would be inaccurate to say they had edge-rusher responsibilities. 

The primary responsibility would be to take on TE blocks in run defense. In that position, there may be a few cases where they have to take on an OT block in run defense, but those would be few and far between, and I would not consider playing an off-ball LB in that spot a structural liability. 

They’re not asked to be a true pass rusher from that spot. The Vikings are not really asking them, or Wilson for that matter, to play above their size in a rugged edge rusher role.

Notably, this trend also stuck when the Vikings played Nickel. On those plays, they typically ran a 4-2-5, and Golday aligned to the boundary consistently in both games. That made him the Will, with Ivan Pace Jr. (or Jacob Roberts) as the Mike, and left the Nickel player, primarily Jamal Adams or Jay Ward, as the Sam. “Nickel Sam” is a general term for how the defense treats the Nickel player, as that player is almost always aligned to the passing strength. Saban terminology calls this player the “Star,” denoted by an asterisk (*).

On the lone Nickel snap the Vikings’ first team defense played, you can see the Vikings align with a mug front, but Wilson is aligned to the boundary. In this case, Van Ginkel is aligned outside as a true edge (of course he actually drops into coverage), something the Vikings didn’t ask Golday or Chambliss to do. In these mug fronts, Golday was exclusively an inside linebacker like Wilson, and Chambliss was off the field, with Ingram-Dawkins on one side (usually the boundary, so replacing Turner in the play below) and Tyler Batty or Bo Richter on the other side (replacing Van Ginkel).

Here are the four primary ways Golday aligned.

Tap any image to view it full size.

With all of that said, the Vikings used Golday in both the Wilson and Van Ginkel role over the course of two preseason games, and they’re clearly preparing him to be versatile. But they used him much more in the Wilson role, so I would say we should consider him to be an understudy at off-ball LB, which is the opposite of what I expected.

Film Study

With his role fully defined, it’s time to dive into the tape on Golday. I think there’s a lot to be excited about.

Pass Coverage

When projecting Golday’s college tape to the NFL level, I generally thought he was a raw prospect. In particular, I thought he struggled in pass coverage. In the first two preseason games, however, he made several positive plays. There weren’t any particularly difficult assignments, but it was a nice step forward.

In zone coverage, Golday showed the ability to track routes in front of him and also follow the QB to the football. On the play below, the Giants throw a quick curl. At the snap, Golday widens towards tight end Theo Johnson, his responsibility in zone at that point, without overcommitting.

If he had overcommitted, he could have abandoned the space needed to cover the middle-of-the-field route from the opposite slot player. Instead, you can see him shuffle left with his eyes on quarterback Jameis Winston until his hands separate, before Golday transitions to driving on the throw. He’s able to quickly wrap and tackle Johnson for no gain after the catch.

This play against the Ravens produces a similar result. From the end zone angle, you can see Golday check the TE’s route, and then put his eyes back to the QB, mirroring Tyler Huntley as he scrambles. That brings Golday to the TE, and he’s in the area of the throw, ready to create a collision at the catch point.

Golday’s tracking of underneath routes also forced a turndown against the Ravens. Any time a QB has to progress in his reads, it creates extra time for the pass rush to get home and for something to go wrong. On this play, Golday is able to drive on the TE route, forcing the QB to go elsewhere with the ball, where Jacob Roberts has good coverage on a wide receiver and the ball is caught for a minimal gain.

This play featured another nice example of solid play in zone. You can see him check the No. 2 receiver going vertical, before moving towards the TE over the middle on a dig. When Huntley scrambles, Golday shows off his athleticism by coming up from his zone depth at the sticks and making a tackle, limiting Huntley to a gain of just 4 yards.

There was one man coverage rep I saw from Golday, the below play where he covers RB Cam Skattebo. It’s a flat route, which is about as simple as it gets, but it converts to a scramble drill. Golday is able to track Skattebo upfield and nicely turns in sync with Skattebo as he looks at the sideline. If QB Jaxson Dart had thrown the ball at Golday, Golday would have been able to deflect the throw.

Still, I’m not convinced Golday will be a stellar coverage player right away in the NFL. As I mentioned above, these were relatively simple coverage responsibilities, and Golday didn’t have to relate to many routes that were physically behind him, which I think is much more difficult to do. He also had a really bad rep against play action, below. On the play, he bites hard on the Ravens’ run fake, completely missing the TE who is crossing his face and running to the flat. This leads to a wide open catch and a gain of over 20 yards for a player that was Golday’s responsibility.

Ultimately, I think Golday will need more time to fully adjust to playing coverage in the NFL game. His preseason play has been very good, but at a low degree of difficulty. However, I am very encouraged that he already appears to have improved from his college play, and hope he can continue that trajectory into the regular season.

Run Defense

Similar to pass coverage, I had concerns about Golday as an off-ball run defender coming out of Cincinnati. Against the Giants and Ravens, he did a lot to alleviate my concerns. It wasn’t always perfect, but let’s dive into how he did.

First and foremost, I thought Golday lacked urgency when defending the run in college. This may have been because he was simply late to read the plays, but he would often be late to move towards the line of scrimmage at the snap. 

Against the Giants, however, Golday set the tone on the very first play by firing forward, taking on a TE’s block, and reading the play in the backfield. The RB cut multiple gaps away from him, and Golday was able to disengage, surf over the gaps, and get in on the tackle. The play went for a decent gain because Banks and Orange both got blown off the ball a little, but Golday prevented it from being an even bigger one.

On the next play, you saw more aggression from Golday, this time against a right tackle, Jermaine Elumenor. Elumenor is a solid starter in the NFL, and Golday is able to pop him a little, lose limited ground (about a yard), and quickly shed the block to try to get after a run going away from him. The play is already blown up by Jamal Adams, but this is a really nice rep.

Golday is very much up for the fight in run defense, and not afraid to stick his nose in the fray. On the play below, he has to fit the run at the point of attack. He takes on a block from both a TE and a pulling guard. He does get knocked to the ground, but so do both of his opponents, creating a pileup. That’s a fine result for an off-ball LB against two blockers. Banks got crushed by a double team on this play, so there was a wide hole, and the RB actually hurdles over the pile, but it still created a big obstacle.

In the Ravens game, Golday was asked to play on the edge more often. We got to see multiple opportunities of him playing contain, and I thought the reps were pretty good. On the play below, he’s matched up against an LT. He is aggressive into contact, and doesn’t lose ground as he holds the edge. The blocker gets his feet knocked out from under him by Pace and falls down, so this rep might look a little more impressive than it actually is with Golday shedding the block, but it’s still a win for Golday.

Taking on an LT was nice, and Golday made taking on TEs look pretty simple. Ok, not as simple as Banks did on the play below, but on the edge Golday was still able to hold his ground and strain to knock the TE back a couple of steps before shedding the block.

The play below shows fruits for Golday’s labor as a contain player. Here, he takes on the TE into the backfield, as the RB tries to run to the edge. Because Golday is holding his spot down, the RB has to cut back into Tyler Batty and is tackled for no gain or a loss.

Even when it wasn’t perfect on the edge, Golday fought hard. The play below is a difficult assignment because he gets hit from a WR pinning him and then has to take on the TE. Golday loses a couple of steps, but at least stays on the outside shoulder, and forces the RB to round his path slightly as he runs to the edge. This give safety Jacob Thomas the time to fire down the alley and make a great TFL.

Golday also showed off his great athleticism multiple times as a run defender. On this play, the center is tasked with climbing to the second level and cutting Golday off. Golday reads the run, drives on it, and the C barely lays a hand on him. The rest of the defense has also done a good job, but Golday’s angle forced the cutback into three white jerseys.

The quickness allows Golday to win in space even without taking on blocks. On the play below, he sidesteps a TE, completely making him miss.

With all that being said, Golday was not perfect in run defense. Leverage and pad level were issues for him in college, and they continued to plague him in these two games. On the play below, he is a bit too passive for my liking. That may be the call, but I’d like to see him aggressively play forward against the double team that’s climbing to him. If he does, he might have caught the C off guard.

Instead, the blocker regains his balance and pops Golday back on initial contact. Golday is also playing with high pads on this play, which will cause him to lose ground against blocks. That was something I thought was a problem in college and might still need to be corrected.

Here’s another play where I think Golday plays with too high of a pad level. This time, he gets off the ball fine, but the RG, 10th overall pick Francis Mauigoa, creates massive displacement on first contact. On the play, Banks did a good job of fighting through a block (even if he lost ground) to make the tackle; otherwise the RB had a wide gap to run through that was vacated by Golday and would have only had to beat the safety for a massive play.

On this next play, Golday does a good job of coming forward, but loses leverage again, this time against Ravens LG Andrew Vorhees. Vorhees is able to move him back multiple steps and widen a hole for the RB to run through. It’s notable that both guards in the last two plays are big dudes, listed at 330+ lbs, but those are the types of blocks you have to take on in the NFL. Golday will need to work on his leverage.

I think there’s also an experience aspect to the play below. On it, Golday is asked to take on a cut block from the FB. As a great athlete, you would hope he could bounce off the block and keep his feet — or something close to it. Instead, he gets knocked completely flat to the ground because he doesn’t approach it correctly. He goes a little too low on approach. Ideally, Golday would get his hands on the blocker’s shoulders here, and help him to the ground while essentially leaping over the block. Pace makes a great tackle on the play, but Golday’s mistake could have led to a decent gain for the offense.

Golday is really athletic, and played aggressively against the run in a way that I thought was much improved from his college tape. He showed an understanding of his role and responsibilities in run defense, and I thought he did a good job of exploding into first contact, straining against blocks, and shedding, particularly when asked to contain. Still, he did get beaten a few times by stronger blockers when he played with poor leverage, something Golday will have to continue to clean up as he transitions to the pro game.

Pass Rushing

The most exciting thing about Golday joining the Vikings was visualizing him as a blitzer in Brian Flores’ defense. He, of course, had multiple opportunities to do so and showed well.

On this play, Golday and Pace are both mugging the A gaps and run a typical stunt for this kind of look. The C turns towards Pace, so Golday picks him and Pace loops around. Golday executes a nice pick, and the C is driven back multiple yards, giving Pace a wide space to beat the RB in pass protection. The ball is out quickly, but this is a very nice rush.

Here is a very similar rep, this time against an RG-and-C combo. Golday does a good job of letting the RG, 14th overall pick Vega Ioane, ride him into the C, creating space for Pace to loop around and get his hands on Huntley. Golday could have done a better job finishing the rep, as he slipped and fell to the ground trying to disengage from the pursuit, but he did his job really well on the play and helped create the scramble.

Elsewhere as a blitzer, Golday ran straight through the RB trying to block him on this rep:

Here, Golday was initially stood up a little, but drove the RB back into the QB’s lap, helping create an unstable throwing platform on a throw that also saw Orange drop into coverage, leading to an incompletion.

He also showed that knockback on the play below against an RB, but in this case he lost contain, allowing Huntley to get around him. You’d like to see him play the outside shoulder of the RB to prevent this, but Golday at least hustled, turning around to chase Huntley down and make the tackle for a limited gain.

Golday’s game probably needs more nuance as a rusher. Below, he’s coming forward and gets too much of a forward lean, allowing Daniel Fa’alele to easily throw him to the ground. The ball is out quickly on a screen.

Like other parts of his game, Golday needs some time to gain seasoning as a blitzer, but his aggression will help him make an impact right away in this role.

Tackling

I was really impressed with Golday’s tackling. He showed a great tackle radius across the two games.

On the play below, Golday is unblocked in the hole, but it’s very wide because both Domonique Orange and Caleb Banes got washed out. RB Eric Gray tries to set him up with a cut, but Golday is able to wrap Gray and bring him to the ground quickly for a limited gain.

The next play is a play action screen. Golday initially comes up to support against the run, then has to robot back when he recognizes play action, and then has to turn and chase the RB to the edge of the defense. That’s a difficult combo of movements, and in the end he’s able to drive, wrap the RB’s leg, and make a tackle to prevent a larger gain.

Later, the Ravens had a 3rd and 9, and Golday had a pretty typical zone drop, but had no real threats over the middle of the field, so there wasn’t much to do in coverage. The QB eventually scrambled, and Golday came up and once again made a tackle outside his frame, bringing the QB down after an 8-yard gain, short of the sticks.

I thought one more interesting play was the large screen gain the Vikings allowed to Giants running back Devin Singletary. Golday is the first defender near Singletary on the play, but I don’t think he’s responsible for the large gain at all. On the play, Golday has the opposing C climbing to try to block him.

He needs to drive the RB to his help, and he runs at Singletary’s outside shoulder, expecting Pace to be able to vice him. Pace overruns the play, and Singletary further cuts across to between Theo Jackson and James Pierre. Jackson should take the inside shoulder and Ward the outside shoulder, but Pierre also overruns the play and lets Singletary all the way to the outside for a huge gain. This was a bad play by the Vikings’ defense, but I don’t think it was Golday’s fault.

Overall, I thought Golday was very efficient as a tackler, showing a wide tackle radius and effectively bringing ball carriers to the ground.

Situational Responsibilities

The Vikings’ defense is different from what Golday is used to in Cincinnati, and he’s still adjusting to a few of the tasks they’re asking him to do. The plays below are somewhere between pass rushing and pass coverage, so I wanted to call them out as a small but significant area where Golday needs to improve.

The first area is what are referred to as “Tag” rushes. That’s when a defender initially steps forward as if he plans to pass rush and usually lays a hand on the offensive blocker, “tagging” him, before dropping back into coverage. This is critical for ensuring free runners on blitzes, as it makes the blocker commit to pass protect against a player who is actually dropping into coverage. The coverage drop is usually meant to take away “hot” routes that counteract the blitz. To my eyes, Golday played these tag rushes too aggressively and needs to improve his cadence to actually be effective in the coverage part.

On the first play below, Golday is lined up in the left A gap against the Giants. He comes forward, gets tangled up with the LG, and then ends up dropping back. The throw is quick, and he then starts chasing it. However, compare Golday’s rush to Pace next to him. You can see Pace pump his arms once before putting his hands up to feign initiating contact and dropping back. He’s well clear of the LOS before Golday steps back. The LG did play this more aggressively than the C did, but Golday needs to transition more quickly and not get caught up.

This also happened in the Ravens game, this time with Golday off the left edge. This is a challenging rep as he gets chipped but still has to come forward to tag the other TE who is pass protecting. You can see that player has a “dual,” reading inside out to block either Golday or Zemaiah Vaughn who is actually blitzing off the edge. Once Golday steps forward from the chip, he gets the TE to commit. At that point, he should put up his hands and fall back. Instead, he takes another full step forward to contact the blocker, and by the time he’s turned around the QB has already thrown the ball. The chip hurts, but this timing is simply way too slow; Golday would have never impacted a hot route with this drop.

The other situation I think Golday needs to master is normal zone drops from a mug formation. He wasn’t asked to play in these situations in college so it makes sense that he’s still learning, but understanding his role will prevent busts. On the play below, you can see that all of Golday, Pace, and Ward drop out from the line of scrimmage, and the Vikings are running a Cover 2 look with two deep zones and five underneath zones. Those zones should be spread out roughly equally. Ward drops straight back, between the numbers and the hash, and has James Pierre well spaced outside of him. Pace angles to the right hash, but Golday angles towards where Ward is. He should instead be angling straight back, to ensure an evenly spaced zone. Ultimately, his responsibility on this play would be to pick up the RB leaking out of the backfield.

I would consider these rookie growing pains, and hopefully Golday can clean them up as he gets more comfortable in the defense. The Vikings are asking him to play from a variety of different angles, and I’m sure there’s some information overload. Experience should help him resolve these issues.

Final Results

We’ve learned that while he split time between the Andrew Van Ginkel and Eric Wilson roles, Jake Golday was asked to play more like Wilson in an off-ball position over the Vikings’ first two preseason games. In that role, there was a lot to like.

First, as a coverage player, Golday was generally sound, relating to underneath routes efficiently and making several positive plays. He demonstrated the fluidity to stick with opponents in man coverage. 

There are still concerns, including a bad rep where he bit hard on a play action, and he can struggle to get into his drops from the line of scrimmage on tag pressures. He also didn’t have too many reps on film that required more difficult coverage processing, but the plays he did have were an encouraging step forward from his college tape.

As a run defender, Golday showed aggression that may indicate a coaching difference between college and the NFL. He did a really good job of setting an edge when asked to play on the line of scrimmage and disengaged from blocks efficiently on several really nice reps. 

His athleticism also allowed him to beat opponents to spots on multiple occasions, and he played in the right position in the Vikings’ run fits. He still has to improve his leverage against stronger blockers, and allowed a few lanes because he lost ground to blocks, but, like in pass coverage, overall his tape was much improved from his college play.

I think Golday can potentially make a quick impact as a blitzer. He was forceful, both acting as a pick player and taking on RBs as a pass rusher. I also think Golday clearly has the athletic ability to effectively wreak havoc as a looper and showed the fluidity in college to corner around the edge when asked to. He might need technical improvements in order to take on blocks from offensive linemen, but I don’t think the Vikings are going to ask him to do that early on.

Finally, Golday really impressed me as a tackler in these two games. I thought he made a number of difficult tackles on relatively open areas, showing a wide radius to get ball carriers down and the athleticism to make late adjustments as his opponents tried to cut.

I don’t know if Golday will be able to consistently crack the Vikings’ lineup early on with the players that are in front of him. If he does, there will be some growing pains as he learns some of the technical details of the position, but his attitude and physical ability will also allow him to make splash plays that should make up for those faults as a young player who is continuing to grow.

Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images

Every preseason, there’s at least one young quarterback who — for whatever reason — was a polarizing or controversial addition to his team. Invariably, that quarterback has a preseason performance that invites scrutiny; perhaps it was because the performance purportedly looked good on film but didn’t produce meaningfully interesting statistics or because the statistics look good on the surface but might be worth additional context.

This year, that performance seems to belong to Ty Simpson, the first-round pick for the Los Angeles Rams whose college profile seemed fine but not overwhelming and wasn’t widely regarded as a first-round pick by most analysts.

This isn’t conjecture; we can quantify this. The group of 134 draft analysts whose rankings composed the Consensus Big Board collectively ranked Simpson 38th overall. He’s not the only first-round quarterback in the last ten years to be ranked outside of the top 32 by consensus — Daniel Jones, Michael Penix Jr. and Bo Nix were all picked in the first round after ranking past the 30s. Not too far away is Josh Allen, ranked 28th overall and drafted seventh overall.

Oh, and Patrick Mahomes ranked 30th but was selected tenth.

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The bulk of analysts ranked Simpson between 30th and 51st overall, with his highest ranking tenth overall (Chris Trapasso of DraftGradeBook.com and Buffalo Rumblings) and lowest 211th (Walker Kelly of the Football Absurdity podcast).

Out of 134 draft analysts, 89 of them (66.4 percent) ranked him outside of their Top 32.

As one can tell from the cohort of quarterbacks one can compare Simpson to, this ranking is not damning in itself, just directional. Nix’s career is starting off strong — though, subject to the above-referenced investigatory analysis that parses production stats — and Allen, with four Pro Bowls and an MVP nod, is Hall of Fame-bound. Mahomes has done alright for himself.

The Simpson pick was perhaps more controversial than the Nix or Penix selections in large part because the Rams weren’t perceived as a franchise that needed an immediate solution at quarterback. With Matthew Stafford, they saw an MVP-level season and an NFC Championship Game appearance.

Of course, with Stafford set to retire sooner rather than later, the Rams certainly need to make an investment at the position. But with the benefit of time comes the luxury of pickiness — why reach now when a more well-regarded quarterback class is coming down the pike?

The biggest reaches, by value, in Consensus Board history at the quarterback position were Baker Mayfield for the Cleveland Browns and Mitchell Trubisky for the Chicago Bears. Both were certainly polarizing picks, and the Browns had any number of options, but it seems some of the criticism was muted by the fact that the Browns and Bears needed quarterbacks immediately.

Regardless, Simpson now has a microscope on him. And, in a matter perfect for the discourse, he put together a performance that was statistically impressive on the surface and remarkably questionable underneath in his first preseason game.

Table of Contents

What Was Interesting About Simpson’s Preseason Stats?

In his first preseason game, Simpson completed 21 of 25 passes for two touchdowns and no interceptions, producing a passer rating of 125.0 — a statistically outstanding mark.

Twitter tweet

When I saw the number of completions and the total passing yardage — 190 — a warning bell went off in my head. Any time a quarterback generates under 10 yards per completion, I’m pretty skeptical that they had a good game.

It’s not an absolute; Patrick Mahomes’ Week 5 game against the Vikings in 2023 is a good example of a low yards-per-completion game that I thought demonstrated quite a bit of quarterback skill. So too with Dak Prescott’s Week 12 game against the Commanders in the same year.

Of course, Mahomes experienced a blitz rate above 55 percent in that game, an extreme situation that calls for that kind of approach — and he still showcased accurate ball placement to generate yards after the catch. These games can require precise quarterbacking to best put an offense in scoring position.

On the other hand, most of Tua Tagovailoa’s 2024 and 2025 did not demonstrate good football, instead throwing short to accommodate a weakness rather than in response to a specific gameplan.

For the most part, these types of games represent hand-holding for the quarterback — a way to engineer around weaknesses and highlight other players on the team, hoping to win with missed tackles rather than precise play.

Is This Meaningful?

Both Simpson games were characterized by a low depth of target. Combined over those two games, he threw 4.70 yards downfield on average, ranking 75th of 78 passers — just ahead of Justin Fields, Tanner McKee and Brandon Allen.

There isn’t much difference in those numbers game to game; against the Chiefs, his average depth of target was 4.72 yards downfield while his game against the Saints featured an ADOT of 4.67 yards.

We can’t tell from the numbers if Simpson specifically had one type of game or the other in either outing, though there are some statistical signs we can look at. The first is dropback depth.

Usually, deep dropbacks signal that the offense is sending receivers downfield, and the quarterback’s footwork is intended to give the receivers time to hit their breaks. If not, the quarterback is often doing something wrong.

One could also look at time-to-throw. This isn’t as definitive; a quick time-to-throw could be a panic throw before the play develops or a gameplan decision — one that could be built around a quarterback’s weakness as much as it is an opponent-specific consideration.

But a short depth of target with a long time-to-throw might tell us that the quarterback was not operating within what was expected of the offense, especially when combined with a deep dropback.

For Simpson, we saw both red flags in his first game, the one that drew such significant praise. Again, nothing’s definitive with these marks, but they point in a particular direction.

Simpson’s time to throw against the Chiefs was 3.13 seconds while his dropback depth, on average, was 4.18 yards from where he snapped the ball.

These statistics tell us nothing in a vacuum and probably don’t mean anything at all if you’re not used to working with this data. So, let’s contextualize.

Only three offenses in the NFL last year had longer times-to-throw, and all three have scrambling passers who buy time, often out of structure: the Chicago Bears, the Tennessee Titans and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Baltimore Ravens, also characteristic of this style, tied that time to throw last season.

Simpson’s dropback depth of 4.18 would have been beaten by four offenses last year — the Arizona Cardinals, Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears and… in first place, the Los Angeles Rams.

Dropback depth is one thing. As far as air yards are concerned, the Rams had the deepest passing offense in the NFL last year, with an average depth of target of 9.24 yards downfield. The Packers ranked fourth (8.76) and the Bears ranked sixth (8.61). The Cardinals were an unusual exception, ranking 24th (7.18). They also benched their starting quarterback, so who knows.

As a percentile of individual game performances, Simpson’s time to throw and dropback depth in his first preseason game would have been in the 75th percentile and 86th percentile, respectively. These are pretty significant signals that the offense is looking for downfield shots.

Twitter tweet

Off the bat, without watching any of the game, we should be at least suspicious of the argument that many made in response to my tweet: that this was in the gameplan and part of smart offensive design.

The Rams are a deep-passing offense, and the fingerprints of the Rams approach are there, even if the actual throw distance wasn’t.

We shouldn’t be hasty drawing broad conclusions. After all, if all deep targets are covered, one would expect a player to check the ball down. Though, importantly, it does mean that the first defense of Simpson’s first preseason game — that short passing was the gameplan — doesn’t hold up.

Interestingly, Simpson’s second preseason game was nothing like this. He threw short again, but he had a very quick time-to-throw and short dropback depth, a good sign that this was now in the gameplan.

Sort of.

On plays where he did have receivers running downfield, he would stall in the pocket, then scramble. These weren’t included in TruMedia’s accounting, and his time to scramble was, on average, 4.90 seconds.

Regardless, we’re left with one fact: Simpson threw short. Does short-throwing statistical success in the preseason mean anything in the subsequent season for young quarterbacks?

Preseason Statcasting

Before looking at short throwing, do good preseason stats tell us anything at all about young quarterbacks?

I looked at all first- and second-year NFL players who played in the preseason with at least 10 attempts and examined their first- and second-year performances.

Among first-rounders, the worst-performing quarterbacks by preseason passer rating included Josh Rosen, Josh Allen, Anthony Richardson, Cam Ward and Mac Jones. Second-round underperformers included Will Levis, Drew Lock and DeShone Kizer. Jones might have an argument for having had a good rookie season, but the rest do not.

Photo by Patrick McDermott/Getty Images

At the other end of the spectrum are high-flyers. They include Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott and Jayden Daniels. Marcus Mariota, who had a good initial showing with the Titans, also looked good in his early preseasons, with a passer rating of 103.5 over his first two years of exhibition play.

Does this suggest that good preseason passer ratings indicate good early performance? Not really — I omitted some key names. Among the underperformers were Brock Purdy, Deshaun Watson and Lamar Jackson, all of whom were instantly outstanding on the field. The best passer rating in the group belonged to Zach Wilson, while Kenny Pickett and Bryce Young weren’t too far behind.

Because passer rating is the statistic being highlighted here, we can use it to test against a more stable measure of NFL-level performance, EPA per dropback.

Correlation, a measure of how closely two sets of numbers relate, can be helpful here. Put another way, correlation answers the question, “if we know one number, how well can we guess the other related number?” — if we know that someone’s preseason passer rating, how well can we guess their EPA per dropback?

That number, the correlation coefficient, runs from -1.0 to 1.0, with either extreme representing a perfect relationship (that is, knowing one number inside the dataset gives us 100 percent of the information we need to guess the other number in the dataset) and 0, in the middle, representing no relationship at all.

The correlation between early-career (first two years of play) preseason passer rating and early-career performance is -0.01. Meaningless.

No correlation!

The relationship is surprisingly, but trivially, stronger for career EPA per dropback, with an r of 0.06.

But perhaps the problem is that some of the high passer rating performances are boosted by high-completion-rate performances — a well-known bias in the passer rating formula, demonstrably polluting it without increasing its signal.

Put another way, a passer rating formula without any completion rating would be better at predicting which quarterbacks would win in the future and which had won. So, let’s look at quarterbacks who earned a high passer rating and exclude those with low depth of targets to see if that improves our cohort samples.

After all, that’s sort of the problem that drove this exercise.

If we set the cut-off at 8.0 yards downfield on average, we get to exclude high passer rating performances from Wilson, Pickett, Teddy Bridgewater and Jaxson Dart. That leaves us with Prescott, Daniel Jones, Justin Fields, Patrick Mahomes, Bryce Young, Mariota and Blake Bortles.

That only barely feels better, but the overall impact is still an improved signal: the correlation coefficient is 0.11 when looking only at passers with a target depth further than 8.0 yards downfield.

For the purposes of projecting initial regular-season performance, low depth of target seems to be a stronger signal of possible poor play than passer rating. Below the 8.0 mark are first-round quarterbacks Mitchell Trubisky, Trevor Lawrence, Sam Darnold, Tua Tagovailoa, Carson Wentz, Kenny Pickett, Jaxson Dart, Johnny Manziel, Bo Nix, E.J. Manuel, Teddy Bridgewater, Jared Goff, C.J. Stroud, Zach Wilson, Jayden Daniels and Cam Ward.

While there are still some rookie- and second-year successes like Daniels, Wentz, Nix and Stroud, this is a pretty worrisome list.

The correlation coefficient for just depth of target to EPA per dropback in early career performance for first- and second-round quarterbacks is 0.06, which is tremendously weak but still slightly stronger than passer rating.

So instead of treating depth of target as a mark of quality itself, we can use it as a filter — those with good performances in passer rating along with a reasonably deep target depth might be worth becoming excited about.

When excluding those with a depth of target below 8.0, the correlation for first- and second-round passers increases to 0.13. We’re actually beginning to cook something interesting, though we need to confront the fact that we’re reduced to just 23 qualifying passers.

Slight correlation!

What really hurts us is the lack of a 2020 preseason, where a lot of prominent first-round quarterbacks emerge from — there’s zero first- or second-year preseason data for Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert and Jalen Hurts and only second-year data for players like Tua Tagovailoa.

The dataset only goes back to 2013, so we also miss first-year data for a strong 2012 class that includes Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin and Ryan Tannehill (Russell Wilson’s data would be useful here, but not in the truncated first- and second-round look).

So, OK, the data tells us what I think a lot of us already expected — a good preseason showing doesn’t tell us there’s a strong likelihood of early success. But to the extent that it can, one goosed by a bunch of easy completions tells us less.

Importantly, a good passer rating with a short depth of target isn’t bad — it’s merely not good.

But, like, what if that’s what the gameplan actually was, or what the defense gave Simpson? We can just look at the game, right? Let’s see if that’s the case.

Film Analysis

The NFL tweeted out a highlight reel for Simpson’s first game — every throw in his preseason debut. But that came from the broadcast angle. Though it can tell us if most of the throws were accurate, it can’t really tell us how deep the other receivers are running their routes.

Photo by David Berding/Getty Images

In something of a low-grade breakout against the New York Giants, Myles Price put up a team-high 51 yards and the team’s only preseason touchdown. That’s a very preseason-y line, but Price was one of the bright spots on the 2nd- and 3rd-team offense, which otherwise struggled mightily. 

In the second game against Baltimore, Price only caught one of his four targets for eight yards. With some inaccuracy from J.J. McCarthy, that’s not necessarily his fault. With such a small sample, can we glean anything anyway?

We probably are squeezing blood out of a stone. That’s kind of all I do here. So let’s go ahead and overanalyze a game you had on the second monitor. One way to expand that sample is to look at more than just the eight plays where Myles Price was targeted.

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Week 1 @NYG: 4/4, 51 yards, 1 TD

Price’s first snap of the game was a 2nd down run where he was responsible for crack blocking Chauncey Golston, who has a 94-pound advantage, according to their official listings. Putting this much effort into setting the edge on a toss play was a nice way to set the tone.

On the ensuing 3rd down, Price ran an under against press coverage from rookie Colton Hood. This is a good test for the 183-pound Price because there is no way to avoid a physical barrier. There’s no route stem to manipulate Hood — he’s in your face and in your way. 

Price gets jacked up, creating no separation. JJ McCarthy has to progress onward to a corner from Jeshaun Jones, whom he overthrows.

This is especially unfortunate because Hood denied the outside release, and Price wanted an inside release. If Hood’s two-hand jam didn’t get as much purchase, the route would have been free and clear. 

In the next series, Price works against Hood again in press coverage. This is a 20-yard curl route mixed with a seven-step play pass, so there is a lot to do. 

Price gives an outside release to widen Hood, then tries to cut back inside. Hood stays square with Price, making Price fight through all that contact anyway. Only then can he stack up Hood, break down at 20 yards, and work back to the ball.

This is all a lot of stuff to do when you still have 20 yards of a route stem to run. So while Price eventually gets by Hood, this takes a ton of time. Here’s the play at the three-second mark, where McCarthy is expected to have a throw ready.

Price is still eight yards away from breaking. Even with perfect anticipation, the QB will have to wait past 3 seconds for Price to finish his route. You can mitigate this to some degree by pairing long routes with long dropbacks, but that only goes so far.

Hood is called for holding over more contact at the top of the route, slowing things down further. McCarthy has to buy the extra time by hitching in the pocket, and he has a bad habit of hitching his way into trouble. So when the time to throw comes, he’s too close to the line to set his feet, and has to hitch back. 

Now the throw is late, and Price is waiting on McCarthy (what a mess!). So he works back toward the quarterback to preserve the separation he spent so much time earning and catches the pass when it arrives.

This is a tough play to evaluate. There’s a focused plan to get separation, which is nice, but Price simply cannot spend that much time, especially if physical contact will slow him down even further, and especially not with a quarterback who routinely makes things worse for himself in long developing plays.

There is a difference between getting open and getting open on time. But don’t mistake this for a wet blanket on Price’s big day. The intentionality behind Price’s routes will carry him farther than his issues with physicality will hold him back.

Take Jordan Addison, at 173 pounds. He carries the same issues with slowdowns when a corner can get physical with him, but Addison is still plenty productive. You can live that way. You just need the right plan to create separation that can’t be thwarted by a good jam. Too often, Price chose the wrong one. 

Photo by David Berding/Getty Images

The Minnesota Vikings have begun to play out their roster battles, and their second preseason game of the year might help clarify some of the fringe starting battles and the bevy of backup spots available across both sides of the ball.

They lost 13-3, though we all understand the result doesn’t matter as much as what the process has revealed. Without most of the starters playing, we have nothing to evaluate the Vikings’ top-line talent or their readiness for the season.

Nevertheless, we’ve learned quite a bit about the team and what depth they can rely on as the season begins. Let’s talk about it.

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Quarterbacks

J.J. McCarthy started off his day inaccurately sailing a pass to Myles Price on the sideline and ended his day doing the same. In between those two less-than-wonderful throws were some egregious missteps and a big play that might define his upside.

A deeper analysis of McCarthy’s day may or may not be incoming, but the long-and-short of it is that he didn’t do much to wash away the bad taste he left — McCarthy-led offenses continued their operational errors and his passes in the red zone obviated what might have been an impressive moment on a deep throw to Tai Felton.

On that play, McCarthy slid up against edge pressure and used that movement in concert with his throwing motion to generate more power, slinging it deep to Felton. The placement wasn’t perfect, but it also wasn’t egregious.

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But skying the two passes he had to open receivers in the end zone, including an extremely open Price, undercuts the glimpses of upside we could see.

McCarthy also oversaw another drive inhibited by process penalties. It is, of course, the case that offensive linemen can be responsible for false starts on an individual level. But the pattern points to an underlying issue: McCarthy himself.

When he’s overseen the offense, process penalties have been an enormous issue. That problem died down as we entered the final stretch of the season and the offense had been simplified, but any question about his ability to handle the full offense remains unanswered.

McCarthy still demonstrated a very high time-to-throw (2.92 seconds) which was nevertheless much lower than his time to throw in the previous game. Wentz’s time to throw was just 2.57 seconds. McCarthy’s decisions invited pressure and he saw pressure on nearly 55 percent of his dropbacks.

Not all of the pressure was his fault. Henry Byrd and Vershon Lee played extremely poorly against the Ravens’ second-team unit, putting McCarthy under substantial pressure throughout the game. Joe Huber wasn’t much better.

But making sure a known issue doesn’t get worse is something quarterbacks like McCarthy need to work on.

Did the other quarterbacks perform better? Well, Wentz pretty much did — but not enough to a degree that one should feel remarkably comfortable in him as a backup option. McCarthy represents a favorable comparison that makes Wentz look outstanding by comparison, but outside of that specific comparison, Wentz was disappointing.

The offense operated on time, but he didn’t demonstrate good operational control beyond that, and though his on-paper accuracy (81.8 percent completion rate) was good, the ball location on those throws didn’t enable receivers to maximize their yards-after-catch.

The pocket management against unfavorable pressure looks was a concern as well; two sacks on 13 dropbacks isn’t entirely his fault but it’s also not completely outside of his control. He leaned away from pressure and the ball died on him even on short throws. Jeshaun Jones, Dontae Fleming and others did excellent work making Wentz’s statistics look good — a dying ball in double-coverage to Jones was the best Wentz gain of the game and it wasn’t as impressive as McCarthy’s throw to Felton.

Brosmer was a bit of a disaster; he wasn’t accurate, he couldn’t manage the pocket and didn’t seem capable of aligning his footwork with the structure of the play.

Offensive Skill Players

Outside of quarterbacks, there’s more good play from the Vikings backup skill depth. Price didn’t show out quite as much as he did in the previous game, but he did look good. On top of that, Felton looked great, making good on the camp hype he’d been building up.

Dillon Bell and Jeshaun Jones also had productive moments, though they’ve been starting well behind the other two when it comes to the receiver depth chart. It’ll be difficult for either to make a case ahead of Felton and Price.

At running back, Zavier Scott showcased what made him such an exciting running back addition last year, but only as a runner. It seems likely that he’ll lose the third running back spot for pass protection reasons; Demond Claiborne, also a liability in pass protection, seems more capable there and has better big-play potential as a runner.

The Defense

Defensively, we saw an early outstanding performance from the second unit that nearly shut out the Snoop Huntley-led second team for the Ravens.

Helping that along came more highlight plays from Elijah Williams, who has an uphill battle for a spot on the defensive line despite his excellent camp and preseason performances over the last two years. With the Vikings all but assured to keep Jalen Redmond and Levi Drake Rodriguez along with draft picks Domonique Orange and Caleb Banks, there may only be one spot left between veteran Isaiahh Loudermilk, Williams and a rotational nose tackle who took snaps last year in Taki Taimani.

Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins complicates that picture as well. The Vikings ostensibly moved him to outside linebacker, but he looked much more effective on the inside and could move back to the defensive line. In this game, we saw the potential Minnesota saw in him when they drafted him — but only on the interior instead of the edge.

We saw some other position shakeups on defense as well. Chazz Chambliss, an edge rusher, played quite a few snaps at off-ball linebacker. He didn’t look fully comfortable in coverage or as a quick trigger in the run game, but was an effective blitzer and did recover some of that comfort in coverage with a thunderous hit over the middle to prevent a first down.

Jake Golday, who primarily played off-ball in the first preseason game, shifted around in this second showing, lining up at times on the edge. This was an expected role for him, both because of his history in college as an edge rusher before switching to off-ball linebacker, and because of comments made by him and the Vikings coaching staff.

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

That alignment helped create pressure but also didn’t compromise anything in the run game, with Golday setting the edge well enough to string out an outside run to the sideline. Also at linebacker, Ivan Pace made a showing — again, primarily as a blitzer. He didn’t complete the process of the sack when he got into the backfield, but it was enough to flush Huntley out of the pocket to secure a tackle well short of a first down.

Edge rusher Tyler Batty showed out a bit too, earning two pressures on his ten pass-rush snaps. He was a steady run defender on top of that and might provide more depth than the Vikings could have reasonably expected this season.

We also saw more from Jacob Roberts, who added to his outstanding preseason so far with four killer tackles near the line of scrimmage and another two besides. Adding a pass-rush pressure on top of that is a nice cherry on top.

In the secondary, eyes were on fifth-round rookie Chuck Demmings (whose nickname, according to Josh Metellus, is “the Prophet,” a reference to his proclivity to cite scripture in the locker room. It could also possibly be a reference to rap-rock supergroup Prophets of Rage, of which Public Enemy’s Chuck D was a member).

Demmings has forced himself into a battle for the third cornerback spot with new free agent signing James Pierre and has looked outstanding in camp in doing so. His preseason hasn’t looked bad either, and he had a good moment in this game against LaJohntay Wester, forcing a drop, and looked good in coverage besides.

Also impressive was Da’Veawn Armstead, an undrafted cornerback that we highlighted in our UDFAs to watch piece in early May.

At safety, the Vikings saw more good play from Jay Ward, though his presence in light of Theo Jackson’s absence suggests that the Vikings have made their decision about who will start at safety alongside Josh Metellus. Also notable was Jacob Thomas’ reappearance as a “starter” for this game, suggesting he’s on the second team.

Jakobe Thomas, one of the competitors for a backup safety spot, once again did not play. But unlike with Jackson, this likely suggests his ongoing injury concerns have held him out of more evaluative exhibition games. That’s unfortunate for the drafted Thomas but does create an opportunity for the undrafted Thomas to make the roster.

There’s reason for optimism at the bottom of the Vikings’ roster, even if some of them don’t come from the areas we hope to see. Caleb Banks is still coming along slowly, and he himself pointed out after the game that he’s not yet in game shape. But with undrafted and late-drafted rookies and second-year players making their case, there’s a solid foundation to build on if the Vikings can do a better job resolving concerns at the top of the roster.