When exciting games lose their thrill
The Vikings' close losses are now piling up after falling 34-31 in Baltimore
Editor’s note: Brian Murphy is on vacation this week so Monday Morning Murph will return next week
By Matthew Coller
If you were watching the Minnesota Vikings’ matchup on Sunday against the Baltimore Ravens just for kicks, you had yourself a pretty thrilling time.
You would have marveled at Justin Jefferson’s 50-yard touchdown and gasped at Cam Bynum’s diving interception. You would have jumped out of your seat at a pass interference call that set up a touchdown and lost your mind when Kene Nwangwu bolted from endzone to endzone for a kick return touchdown.
Your eyeballs would have popped plum out of your head when the fullbacks turned into play makers. Patrick Ricard steamrolling and CJ Ham doing a better Odell Beckham Jr. impression than Odell himself these days.
If you didn’t have a team in the fight, you would have thrown your hands in the air with excitement at Kirk Cousins’s touchdown pass to Adam Thielen in the waning moments and wanted to buy an NFT of Anthony Barr’s interception on a tipped Lamar Jackson pass. You woulda gotten out your eyeblack as the Ravens started to smash the Vikings’ defense into a pulp and then when it was all over, you would have taken a sip of your diet coke and declared that that was a pretty darn compelling NFL game.
But nobody who’s reading this was watching that game for jollies. B.B. King said it best: “The thrill is gone away, you know you done me wrong, baby, and you’ll be sorry someday.”
Vikings fans were watching to see if their team could get themselves back on track and make a season of this thing. Instead they turned off TVs late Sunday afternoon thinking about the track that this train is following. To quote The Boss: Where it’s going, everybody knows.
Out of the eight games the Vikings have played this year, seven of them have been spine-tinglers. They opened the season 0-2 with one loss caused by a Dalvin Cook fumble/botched review and the other via Greg Joseph’s wide-right gaffe. After a convincing win over the Seahawks, they lost by a touchdown to the Cleveland Browns. After that game Mike Zimmer declared that they are a good football team — and even said that Kevin Stefanski agreed.
Since then, they needed a last-second field goal to beat the Lions, overtime to pull off a win versus Carolina and then lost to Cooper Rush and blew a second half two-touchdown lead to Baltimore.
Some crazy things to think about before we go any further: The Vikings now need to win three of the next four games to equal the same place they were in 2020 after 12 weeks. If we go back to the point of last season when they were .500 (Week 13), they are 4-8 since and two of those wins are against the Lions. They sit in 10th place in the playoff race. After eight weeks last year, they were in 10th place.
But you have to admit: It was a pretty cockamamie game against the Ravens. There were some strange and memorable things, like the sideline being penalized for a team employee pushing Devonta Freeman after a first down run. Oh and the Vikings having 12 men in the huddle. That’s not new for the franchise, ahem, but it’s unusual. They hadn’t had a kick return for a touchdown since Cordarrelle Patterson left. Justin Jefferson had his longest catch of the year and Ham’s grab was the longest play of his career. Anthony Barr got his first pick since early in the 2019 season and Lamar Jackson broke some QB rushing record that Michael Vick held.
There’s a lot going on there. But while every close loss is its own snowflake with layers that make it different, they all have some things in common: We usually end up wondering where the offensive aggression went after early success. We find a couple of in-game decisions that didn’t help matters. We are underwhelmed by the lack of targets for Justin Jefferson and Adam Thielen. All that sorta stuff.
Thielen and Jefferson were caught fewer passes than Tyler Conklin and someone named Luke Stocker. The offense went 5-for-14 on third down one week after going 1-for-13.
And the defense, well, it gave them a chance but eventually it broke under the pressure of repeatedly having the ball given quickly back to Jackson.
While the Ravens converted all three fourth downs — as has become their way of doing things with an MVP quarterback — the Vikings elected to run on second-and-long repeatedly and when they had a chance to possibly win the game with a two-point conversion, they kicked the extra point and then had no real explanation for why.
“I thought about it,” Zimmer said. “They had a heck of a kicker, over a minute left and three timeouts, I think it was.”
How that makes a difference, who knows. But they also called back-to-back timeouts last week, so that’s how things are going.
That’s the reality when you aren’t good enough to put teams away: Every penalty flag or decision that doesn’t go your way is amplified. They all make for wonderful fodder to break down after the game but it ultimately comes down to playing with fire and getting burned. The Lions won’t toast you, the Ravens will.
The great pitcher Mike Mussina once said that when he got older he felt like he couldn’t afford the umpire to miss a strike call on the black because he wasn’t sure if he could make that pitch again. The Vikings can’t afford to have an eight-yard loss on the first play of a drive because they can’t get it back. They can’t afford to produce three points in two different drives after interceptions.
Though these close games have turned into more of a drag than weekly carnival for Vikings fans, there’s a debate to be had whether these results are the product of a deeply flawed roster with enough talent to hang with the big boys for only so long or are they handcuffed by first-year play caller and head coach whose time has come and gone? Or have the quarterback’s traditional ups and downs come at the worst times this year? Is it that the offensive line can’t block well enough for a consistent run or passing game? Is it that the defense has too many weaknesses or injuries to close games?
Earlier this year, randomness was in play. After Sunday, that’s pretty much ruled out. It’s probably a combination of all those things.
So where does that leave us? Well, first, you’ll never forget this season. Maybe the details of bizarre sideline penalties or which field goals went in at the end will fade but this will be the one where they had all the close losses and then either found something deep within themselves to bounce back and make the playoffs or completely fell apart.
Either way, the thrill of the close game is gone after Sunday and time is running out for the Vikings to find something that hasn’t been there in a long time.
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I read that the OL gave up just 6 pressures yesterday. Now we know the magic number needed to put Cpt Squeeky into panic mode, causing him to ignore developing routes and dump off to his check downs.
Watching the Vikings games is like watching the movie Groundhog Day. Vikings core early, the score is close at halftime, and they lose late.