Brian Baldinger breaks down the Vikings’ defensive performance

When you hold the highest-scoring offense in the National Football League to just seven points (and none in the final fifty-five minutes of game time), people are going to wonder how exactly you did it. One of the NFL Network’s better analysts took a look at some of the ways the Minnesota Vikings shut down the high-flying Los Angeles Rams in Week 11, walking away with a 24-7 victory.

(Clicking on the video will end up giving you a link to watch it on YouTube. NFL Network is still a big finicky about who can embed what where.)

Brian Baldinger takes a look at several different plays from Sunday’s game from the “All-22” perspective, which allows us to see exactly what the Vikings were doing all over the field. It shows the Vikings putting the clamps on star running back Todd Gurley, and how they prevented quarterback Jared Goff from generating any huge plays in the passing game.

It really is kind of neat to see how everything fits together for this defense, and just how disciplined they are in their assignments. There’s one play that could have turned into a huge play for the Rams (if Eric Kendricks didn’t almost rip Goff in half), but other than that, the Vikings’ defense didn’t give the Rams a whole lot to work with.

While many of us thought that the Vikings could beat the Rams yesterday, I don’t think many of us expected to hold them to just one score. This video gives an outstanding perspective on exactly how that happened, and is well worth a watch.