Mike Zimmer set the bar high and then couldn't reach it
The Vikings fired Zimmer on Monday
By Matthew Coller and Sam Ekstrom
Matthew’s reaction
A good way to judge team expectations is to look at Vegas over-unders. The House isn’t a fan of any team and it has money on the line, so it’s going to tell you what the world thinks is most realistic. In three of the last four years, the Minnesota Vikings failed to go over their Vegas expected win total, which seems like the best way to summarize the Mike Zimmer era in Minnesota. During his time, the Vikings raised expectations to the point that they were expected to compete for the NFC North and make the playoffs year in and year out. But the Vikings failed to meet those expectations over the last four seasons, resulting in Zimmer’s firing on Monday.
When Zimmer was hired by the Vikings in 2014, the team was in disarray. The Vikings had the worst defense in the NFL and no answer at quarterback. Two years later, they celebrated a division championship and lined up for a game-winning field goal against the Seattle Seahawks in the wild card round of the playoffs. Two years after that, they were one game away from the Super Bowl.
In some people’s eyes, Zimmer’s time in Minnesota will be defined by the things that got in the way of fulfilling the club’s potential. Whether it was Adrian Peterson’s absence in 2014, Blair Walsh’s shanked kick in 2015, Teddy Bridgewater’s injury in 2016 or Sam Bradford’s absence in 2017, the truth of the first four years of Zim was that the Vikings had to overcome problems that usually sink teams. Maybe there’s an alternate universe in which a healthy Bridgewater or Bradford either wins the No. 1 seed in the NFC in 2017 or beats the Philadelphia Eagles to earn a the team’s first Super Bowl appearance since the 70s but it was not to be, as fans would say, because Vikings.
The first four years of the head coach’s tenure were littered with what-ifs and talks of curses but during that time Zimmer garnered the reputation as a never-say-die coach whose teams could find themselves in the thick of the playoff race no matter what went wrong. The trails and progress of 2014-2017 forged the belief from fans are ownership that Zimmer teams were impervious to being bad. Despite all the aforementioned road blocks, the Vikings went 32-16 during the first stanza of Zimmer’s tenure.
While the Vikings came out of the 2017 season on a high that made them believe they were a quarterback away from being a Super Bowl team, there were things lurking in the shadows that went unnoticed. The 2017 season made it easy to forget the drama of 2016 in which Zimmer’s offensive coordinator quit midway through the season and the locker room walked away feeling alienated. The lack of turnover on the Vikings’ defense made it easy to think they would repeat their performance year after year. And the effectiveness of the team’s cap management made it easy to think Kirk Cousins’ contract wouldn’t be a major issue.
But throughout the Cousins years, things got rocky and Zimmer wasn’t able to right the ship. In 2018, he feuded with offensive coordinator John DeFilippo, eventually firing him with three weeks left to go in the year. The Vikings lost in an offensive no-show to the Chicago Bears to miss the playoffs that year. Cousins and receiver Adam Thielen shouted at each other on the sidelines while Zimmer and GM Rick Spielman sat alone on the bench.
That’s when the heat turned up. By 2019, no longer was Zimmer the guy who overachieved with a team that once seemed lost at sea. He was now the leader of the biggest underachieving team in football and desperately needed a bounce-back year with Cousins at the helm to stick around. Coaches in the NFL simply do not get back-to-back failed seasons, as we have learned with his firing.
You might look back at the 10-6 record and playoff win in 2019 and see it as the Vikings returning to legitimacy as a contender. As Zimmer showing his ability to turn things back in the right direction. But that’s reading only the cover of the book. Minneapolis Miracle man Stefon Diggs revealed in a 2020 interview that he felt alienated by the head coach when he campaigned for the team to throw more often, only to be ignored. At the time, many thought Diggs was being a diva. What has happened since in Minnesota and Buffalo have proven he was simply right.
Pressure built when the Vikings repeatedly failed to beat good teams. That issue reached a crescendo in a 23-10 loss to the Packers at US Bank Stadium with the NFC North on the line. Leading up to the 2019 playoff game in New Orleans, there were reports the Vikings could trade Zimmer to Dallas if the Vikings lost. People within the organization were pining for the team to hire Kevin Stefanski as the head coach.
But Zimmer’s tenure will indeed be remembered as one where he wouldn’t go down without swinging, poking eyes and biting. He dialed up a brilliant gameplan against Drew Brees and the Saints and Cousins rewarded the team’s investment with game-winning drive. In the locker room after the game, Zimmer talked about the outside criticism for Cousins and his QB screamed, “You like that?”
That would be the final time the Vikings were a winning team. They no-showed the following week in San Francisco and never cleared .500 again.
The last four years have felt like riding a merry-go-round. There’s lots of ups and downs but the team ultimately just went in circles. At the 2020 NFL Combine, Zimmer likened his roster to the 2014 group he inherited. Age and the Vikings’ cap manipulation eventually caught up with them as Everson Griffen, Xavier Rhodes, Trae Waynes and Linval Joseph were let go and the rebuild began. However, the Vikings made the decision to give Cousins a contract extension, which kept the pressure to be a winning club directly on Zimmer and Spielman. A set of bizarre moves that included trading for Yannick Ngakoue and franchise tagging Anthony Harris shined a light on the fact that the playoff win over the Saints could only wash away so much distaste left over from 2018.
The Vikings started the season 1-5 but ended up getting themselves in the hunt late in the 2020 season. They repeated nearly the exact same formula this year, only with different names and more close losses. The offseason was spent veteran signing players who had a low percentage to be difference makers with the hope that Zimmer could coach ‘em up. It turned out that nobody is good enough at dialing up blitzes to overcome bad drafting, ineffective signings and a shade of bad luck.
Fans rode the roller coaster of game-winning drives and heartbreaking meltdowns but the result ended up the same: The Vikings went into the final weeks needed a whole lot of luck to make the playoffs.
Once again, they hit the under. Expectations weren’t met.
When the Vikings were eliminated in Green Bay, Zimmer held a defensive post-game press conference in which he solidified one of the common criticisms during his tenure: That he pointed the finger everywhere else but at himself. He mocked a reporter’s question about the disappointing season and slammed rookie Kellen Mond.
The day after the game, an article was published by The Defector breaking down the issue with the Vikings’ nepotism in hiring coordinators.
Endings in the NFL are rarely ceremonious. The head coach whose teams were known for their fight went out in back-to-back seasons in meaningless games. Few coaches survive that.
We will always wonder how things could have been different if certain injuries didn’t happen or if certain draft picks were hits instead of busts or if the Vikings picked another quarterback to lead them after the 2018 season. But the scoreboard is the scoreboard and now Vikings’ the franchise looks much like it did when Zimmer arrived. There’s lots of work to be done and new expectations to be set.
Sam’s take
Mike Zimmer should be remembered as a quality coach whose tenure was spent either one step from a breakthrough or one step from the edge of the cliff.
Never making the playoffs consecutive years was a huge disappointment considering the rosters Minnesota had in 2016 and 2018, but not missing the playoffs consecutive years until the very end demonstrated Zimmer’s ability to keep his team competitive.
The NFL operates in two-year windows nowadays. Two years of bad quarterback play? Make a change. Two years without the postseason? You probably need a new coach. And Zimmer didn’t buy enough equity in previous seasons to earn a longer leash during the tumultuous last two years.
Zimmer was once seen in an NFL Films video shouting “I love adversity!” on the sideline during a game. While it’s true that Zimmer enjoyed competing against the best, matching wits with other elite coaches and using the perpetual chip on his shoulder as fuel, his Vikings teams didn’t always walk the walk when it came to overcoming long odds.
Zimmer’s Vikings went 17-40 (.298) against teams that finished the season with a winning record. That ranks 20th in the league since 2014, in the same company as the Falcons, Dolphins, Bengals and Panthers.
Of course, you can point to 2015 and 2017 as Zimmer’s finest works. In 2015 the Vikings defense matured ahead of schedule to win the NFC North, then peaked in 2017 when it was good enough to lead the Vikings to a conference title game. The continuity of the 2015-19 defense was a marvel in today’s high-turnover NFL, which adds to the disappointment of only reaching one NFC Championship Game in that span.
What went wrong? Well, it was often on the offense, which tended to wither as seasons went along under Zimmer. Norv Turner and Zimmer didn’t seem to click, which led to the atrophy of the 2016 team that fell apart in a 3-8 finish as Turner resigned midseason. But with new coordinators every year after it was still a chore for the offense to find consistency. Under Cousins, the Vikings finished 3-4 in 2018, 2-3 in 2019 and 1-3 in 2020. They hit a 2-4 stretch entering their final game of 2021 before Sunday’s meaningless win. Zimmer’s involvement in the offense has always been ambiguous — on one hand, his insistence to run the ball seemed to handcuff offensive coordinators, yet Zimmer was routinely hands-off with Cousins until they started meeting weekly in 2021.
While Zimmer’s offenses have struggled during the annual playoff push, his defenses of the last two years may be his undoing. Zimmer’s inability to groom the youth he was given in 2020 or win with veterans in 2021 challenged the belief that Zimmer could effectively build another dominant defense as he did initially, when he excelled at developing young players and incorporating seasoned vets.
One constant was Zimmer’s work ethic, which nobody will ever question. In his most recent interview with team announcer Paul Allen, he said he hadn’t found time to fix a busted tooth he broke off eight weeks ago. This is the same coach that was squinting through a surgically-repaired eye to watch film in 2016.
Those sacrifices spoke to an insatiable competitive drive that, even by NFL standards, was impressive.
But it also seemed to wear Zimmer thin as the seasons wore on. The final image of Zimmer will be one of a tired coach who never short-changed the organization with his effort, but through a combination of management’s roster building, inconsistent quarterback play and some outdated ideals of his own, couldn’t get over the hump.
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Mike Zimmer is a good coach and I’ll miss him. Go back to your fantastic ranch, sit in that impressive chair and write a book! Let it all out! Blue sky and tailwinds Coach…
Both Rick & Mike being gone was needed…everything was stale and a fresh set of eyes is needed to decide if Kirk is worth staying longterm. Please please please let Mike Zimmer do a press conference as he might go scorched earth