David Levine
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Joined: 7/14/2007
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NFL 3-0 starts: Which undefeated teams are real contenders?
Minnesota Vikings
The wins: at N.Y. Giants (28-6), vs. San Francisco (23-17), vs. Houston (34-7)
The most fascinating team of these five has to be the Vikings. We spent much of the offseason discussing their decisions to move on from quarterback Kirk Cousins, draft J.J. McCarthy as the replacement and trade up in Round 1 to take edge rusher Dallas Turner. And so far, the top two picks have played virtually no role in this start; McCarthy is out for the season with a torn meniscus in his right knee, and Turner has one sack across 54 snaps, having missed last week's win over the Texans with a knee issue.
Minnesota already has had to deal with a lot of missing players. McCarthy won't play this season. Wideout Jordan Addison injured his ankle before the season and has played 28 snaps. Dalton Risner, who started at guard a year ago, is on injured reserve. Tight end T.J. Hockenson is still a ways away from returning after tearing up his knee last season. Ivan Pace, last year's revelation at linebacker, missed Week 3 with a quad injury. It has been a lot for three weeks.
And yet, the Vikings have two of the more impressive wins we've seen this season. Blowing out the Giants was one thing, but they were up by two scores for much of the second half against the 49ers, then blew out a 2-0 Texans team by 27 points. At plus-55, they have the third best point differential of any team, trailing only the Bills (plus-64) and Saints (plus-59).
Minnesota's defense has become appointment film viewing on a weekly basis. Last season, coordinator Brian Flores installed an unconventional blitz-heavy, zone-based coverage that seemed to break the rules of what defenses were supposed to do at times. As ESPN reporter Kevin Seifert documented in January, while the innovations yielded the league's best defense for a 10-week stretch, teams eventually figured out where the Vikings could be attacked. After ranking second in points allowed per drive between Weeks 4 and 14, they fell to 31st in the same category over the final month of the season, going 0-4 in the process.
The 2024 defense looks like a better and more sustainable version of the 2023 unit, combining the pre- and post-snap uncertainty that helped create its success with better players who are capable of both masking what they're going to do and actually executing a variety of responsibilities well. It's easy to tell Flores is creating havoc on a defense when the opposing quarterback compliments his scheme after a win.
This is a defense full of hybrids. Players who were here a year ago continue to thrive, including Josh Metellus, nominally a defensive back whose most frequent starting position on defense this season has been lining up as a blitzer in the A-gap. The Vikings have added Andrew Van Ginkel, a former inside linebacker who played more and more on the edge with the Dolphins the past few seasons. Used full-time as a slot defender now, his ability to drop into coverage on the backside of sim pressures and overloads is lethal. He already has took a pick-six to the house on a screen against the Giants.
What Flores has done is divorce the pre-snap look opposing quarterbacks are seeing from the actual post-snap coverage they get to a greater extent than any other quarterback. There's one number that stands out to me here. According to NFL Next Gen Stats, when a Vikings defender has lined up on the line of scrimmage this season, he has dropped back into coverage nearly 45% of the time. That's nearly double the league average and seven percentage points beyond the second-placed Chiefs, who are as close to 10th as they are to first.
Flores is still sending plenty of blitzes -- Minnesota's 39.3% blitz rate is the third highest in football -- but most of those pressures are coming on first and second down, where the unit is blitzing at the second-highest rate. On third down, the Vikings blitz only 23% of the time, which is below league average (22nd). The Kyle Shanahan offenses thrive by picking defenses apart on early downs, and Flores has outmaneuvered them in back-to-back weeks. Then, on passing downs, his defense drops into coverage and swallows everything up.
This led to a frustrating game for Brock Purdy and an exasperating one for C.J. Stroud, who threw two interceptions and got away with at least a couple more. The Texans gained six net yards on 18 second-down plays last Sunday. Yes, that's 0.3 yards per play. Only three teams have had a worse day on second down in any game over the past five seasons. That meant Stroud faced third-and-10-plus on 10 different occasions, the first time that has happened for any team since 2022. Stroud spent many of those snaps scrambling and struggling to find any of his star receivers open.
While much has been made of general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah's 2022 draft class and their struggles to get on the field for various reasons, the Vikings have managed to cobble together a cornerback room of veterans for relatively cheap. Byron Murphy, Shaquill Griffin and Stephon Gilmore were all signed as free agents, with Murphy coming in last season, Griffin signing in March and Gilmore joining in mid-August after a multiyear market never developed. They've helped Minnesota rank third in QBR allowed when the pass rush doesn't happen to get home. Even special-teamer Kamu Grugier-Hill managed to come away with an interception while filling in for Pace at linebacker last week. This is the league's most entertaining defense.
If I'm wildly optimistic about the defense, I'm a little more concerned about the offense. The McCarthy injury forced the Vikings to turn to Sam Darnold, who signed a one-year deal for about $10 million in March. They have to be thrilled with the early returns. He ranks fifth in the NFL in QBR (73.5) and is averaging 8.4 yards per attempt while throwing a league high eight touchdown passes.
Have the Vikings unlocked the Darnold many expected when the Jets drafted him with No. 3 overall in 2018? I'm skeptical. We've seen him show off his talent and make some spectacular throws, most notably the 97-yard touchdown pass to Justin Jefferson, but that shouldn't be a surprise. He always has had an NFL-caliber arm, and he once held the league lead for rushing touchdowns during a hot start to the 2021 season with the Panthers.
That season, though, bears some parallels to this one. That version of Darnold and the Panthers got off to a 3-0 start, and he was able to spend virtually all of those games playing from ahead. When Christian McCaffrey went down injured and Carolina started to trail in contests, his hot start quickly dissipated.
Darnold has taken only three dropbacks this season in situations in which the Vikings were trailing. They were in the opening quarter of Week 1 against the Giants, which didn't really qualify as an obvious passing situation. To use the Next Gen Stats model of how likely a pass attempt is to occur on a given play, 41 of Darnold's 89 dropbacks have come in situations where the likelihood of a pass was 75% or greater.
In those situations, Darnold averages 5.8 yards per attempt, which ranks 23rd out of 31 quarterbacks. He has four touchdown passes on 34 attempts, which boosts his passer rating up to a very impressive 116.8, but I'm not sure he has been great in those spots on the whole. He ranks second in the NFL, on the other hand, in yards per attempt in all other situations.
Even given that he hasn't been trailing often, there's been enough of the old Darnold that I'm hesitant to jump onboard with the idea that this is a new quarterback. He has fumbled three times, including a contested pass that went 5 yards backward, and an inexplicable overhand pitch attempt on a play whose timing was busted. Minnesota has recovered all three. He has thrown two bad picks and had, by my count, at least four interceptable passes in his first three games that fell harmlessly to the turf after being defensed. He added a dead-to-rights intentional grounding penalty against the 49ers, admittedly on a play in which there was instant pressure up the A-gap.
The truth on Darnold probably falls somewhere between the guy who struggled badly with the Jets and Panthers and the one who's off to a 3-0 start. The Vikings will inevitably be in situations where he needs to throw, and that's where we'll get the best sense of his development over the past few seasons. A matchup with a Packers defense that just walloped Will Levis should be compelling, but the following week will be must-see television: Darnold will get a rivalry game against his old organization, facing the Jets in England.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/41433862/nfl-3-0-starts-undefeated-teams-real-contenders-2024-playoffs-standings
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