By Matthew Coller
EAGAN — Last week in the Minnesota Vikings’ 9-3 win over the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field, a guy who was in the United Football League three years ago stripped the ball away from running back D’Andre Swift at the goal line to save a touchdown.
In the fourth quarter with Chicago looking to tie the game, a player who was a part-timer with the Indianapolis Colts and Philadelphia Eagles blocked a field goal.
During the contest, a former fifth-round pick had five QB pressures and a sack. An undrafted free agent who has largely played special teams for most of his career played 66 plays and led the team in tackles. His linebacking partner, a fifth-round pick, had the key pass rush the week before against the Green Bay Packers.
Both of the starting safeties were cut out of their first training camps and didn’t become full-time players for several years.
Two of the defensive tackles were Day 3 projects who developed into starters.
The nickel corner is a veteran special teamer who only started to see work in Pittsburgh on defense last year.
And the cherry on top is the undrafted free safety from James Madison University who contained Caleb Williams on a blitz.
I’m sensing a trend with Brian Flores’ defense, which has been central to the Vikings’ 2-0 start with both wins coming in the division.
Before we dive into how such a large percentage of the Vikings’ defense has come from unique backgrounds and taken the long road to playing important roles on a dangerous defense, we do have to mention that first-round draft pick Dallas Turner was the most productive player in the game and first-rounder Caleb Banks made plays and first-rounder and future Hall of Famer Harrison Smith is out there doing his thing too.
But it’s downright remarkable that Flores’ unit has so many players that either were Day 3 selections or UDFAs who did not start right away in the NFL. Out of the 18 players who took snaps on Sunday, the only guys who were taken on Day 1 or 2 were Turner, Banks, Smith, Kyle Van Noy and Byron Murphy Jr. and 11 of them didn’t start right away.
Credit to my Vikings Collective podcast co-host Garret Greenlee who called them the “Island of Misfit Toys” defense. It’s the perfect description of a group of players who took the long way to finding their homes in Minnesota with an evil-genius defensive coordinator who does not care in the slightest where anybody was drafted.
How is this possible though?
I spent the week in the Vikings’ locker room trying to find out.
The proper person to begin that conversation with is Andrew Van Ginkel.
He is the poster boy for B-Flo success stories. Coming out of high school, he had as much FBS interest as I did so he went to South Dakota as a defensive end, then transferred to Iowa Western Community College.
Let’s just stop there for a second and try to guess the percentage chance that Van Ginkel would have to become an All-Pro NFL player in 2016 when he was at Iowa Western. I’ll go with 0.06%.
After Van Ginkel ended up at Wisconsin and played well as a tweener inside/outside linebacker, Flores saw something in him in the draft and the Dolphins selected AVG in the fifth round.
By Year 3 of his time in Miami, Van Ginkel had 45 QB pressures, 807 snaps and starred on a defense that went from 32nd in the NFL to the top half of the NFL in an eyeblink under Flores.
AVG’s explanation for it starts above the shoulders.
“I think it starts with Flo being able to trust you,” Van Ginkel said. “There’s so many moving parts, there’s so many different things that can change from a drive-to-drive or game-to game-basis. If you’re not smart and coachable — if you don’t want to be coached, it’s hard to fit within the scheme. Flo does a good job finding the players who are gonna work hard and play for him.”
The Vikings’ defense is definitely not for the faint of brain cells. Players are almost all asked to line up at multiple different positions, understand everyone else’s role on the defense, process how they are being attacked by the offense and make adaptations at a moment’s notice. Flores explained last year that Harrison Smith has “total autonomy” to change coverages no matter the play call, which means that everyone else has to hear it and lock in their assignments in a matter of seconds.
That’s not something that just happens for everybody.
Van Ginkel’s explanation of the defense reminded me of something that Harrison Phillips said one time about being a human fire hydrant. He didn’t just mean that he was hard to move but that he also took the brunt of whatever came his way without anybody noticing. He used a metaphor about what dogs do to fire hydrants.
That’s a pretty common mentality among nose tackles. They do a lot of dirty work without adulation. In Flores’ defense, however, everybody has to be a fire hydrant sometimes. Because players take on so many different types of roles, you might be the guy who’s slamming their body into a blocker or running up field with no chance of getting a sack in order to get someone else a free rush at the QB. You can’t be selfish and have it work.
“It is just trusting [the scheme] and having that humility that I’m just gonna do my job here,” Van Ginkel said.
He added that there’s a lot of times where plays don’t exactly appear to be built for one guy to thrive but it works out that way anyway — if done correctly. The players who fit with Flores know that.
“There’s different things within the scheme that… if you do what they ask you, you’re in the right position, I’m a firm believer that the ball will find you, you will make plays,” Van Ginkel said. “There’s plenty of examples of it across the past few seasons.”
When you think about this type of mentality, it makes so much sense that former special teamers like Josh Metellus, Eric Wilson and James Pierre would be good fits. Most players come into the league with zero special teams experience and then have to adapt quickly to learn a bunch of new skills. They have to be willing to be coached by special teams coaches and do anything it takes to stay on the roster without much recognition.
“Every starter on the team has probably has played special teams at some point,” said safety Josh Metellus, who was a special teamer from 2020-2022 before getting a starting chance with Flores in 2023. “That’s a very selfless thing to do and very team thing to do. Flo talks about it a lot.”
Eric Wilson has another thought. He believes that the players on this team are able to get messages across to each other, whether it’s in meeting rooms or in the final seconds before the snap. It’s part of their skillset to have no language barriers.
“I think it’s a matter of just making sure we can communicate with one another regardless of, what type of player we are, where we come from, what we’ve been through… whether that’s a vet to a vet, vet to a rookie, rookie to a vet.” Wilson said.
Metellus thinks that the high-level communication, regardless of age/experience comes from Flores emphasizing that the players get to know each other off the field.
“Flo likes to talk about unique relationships and I would say that our group of guys, we gel a lot better than with groups I’ve had in the past just because a lot of us do come from the same background, had the same journey, whether that was football or off the field,” Metellus said.
“We have a lot of guys who’ve been through things,” Wilson said. “I think it brings us together a little bit more because we can relate to one another.”
When it comes to acquiring players, head coach Kevin O’Connell noted that they aren’t just looking for players who have certain skillsets, they are looking for players whose personalities will work within the group.
“Really it’s about the fit,” O’Connell said. “It’s about guys’ ability to thrive, hopefully not only in our scheme, but the way we do things around here from what our players have built in the locker room.”
The newest of those players who fit like a glove within the scheme and locker room is undrafted free agent Jacob Thomas.
When Thomas arrived, he got some good advice from Metellus and veteran Tavierre Thomas. They told him to put as much effort into special teams as possible and the rest would come his way. He did that during OTAs and the early part of minicamp but then a rash of injuries pushed him into getting first-team reps, where he proved to Flores that he could be trusted.
When he looked around the first-team defense, he saw a lot of players with similar stories to his own.
“There’s amazing guys to look up to on this team who have maybe been overlooked but have come into their own,” Thomas said. “This defense is special, and they go out there and show it every single Sunday. So to be in his locker room, it’s just amazing to learn from.”
Thomas isn’t just learning, he’s playing. I asked him if he ever envisioned a year ago that he’d be trying to tackle Caleb Williams at Soldier Field.
“If you would have told me that, I would have thought you were joking,” Thomas said, while adding that he felt like the defense was a good fit for him from the start because his college defense tried to do a lot of things that Flores does.
“Flo and his coaches do a great job of putting people in positions that they thrive in — very advantageous positions,” Thomas said.
As the Vikings head to Tampa Bay as a 2-0 team, the players on the 2026 Vikings defense know what this defense could become because they’ve seen it before. In 2024 and 2025, they finished in the top 10 in points allowed.
This could be the most complete group yet, in large part because many of them have been with Flores over multiple seasons and have built up the bonds required to be a nightmare for opponents.
“I think the player ownership of the final product that goes on the field as a check defense allows guys to have that much more confidence when they truly are locked in, all 11 out there playing the call, and everybody’s on the same page. It’s fun to watch,” O’Connell said.
Outstanding work Matthew. This is the type of true journalism that separates the good beat writers like yourself from the national media. Or even worse; the tv personalities that just spew out stats or talk loud so it sounds like they know what they are talking about. I constantly tell my friends; if want to know what is really going on with a team read the beat writers material. Thank you
So great. I wonder, is it possible to have this style on offense as well? Or are the roles too defined and segmented for it to work this way? I feel like KOC has a similar strategic mind.