FanPost

The End

At this point, I would be very surprised if Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman are leading this franchise when the new league year rolls around next March. Usually when I see takes like that after two games (even if they are both abysmally bad performances) I roll my eyes and mutter something about "typical internet overreactions". But this isn't based on just these two games. This is based on what has been a two season long trend in this team: Constant and consistent decline.

Coming off the 2017 season the Vikings were the hot team in the NFL. Many power rankings heading into 2018 had them in the top 3, if not in the top spot. Sure, they had just lost in the NFC championship game, but their defense had been consistently elite for years, and the offense (which had just completed their best season under Zimmer) had seemingly upgraded at the most important position on the field. However, the decision-making behind that "upgrade" was severely flawed and was the key factor in the decline over the following seasons.

Before we go any further, I want to make perfectly clear that I don't really think Cousins is a terrible QB. Bashing him right now is very much so in vogue among the Viking fandom, but he's really not that bad. In fact, I will go so far as to say that overall he is an above average QB, ranking somewhere between 10-15 in the league hierarchy. Under the right circumstances he could have a Joe Flacco or Eli Manning style Superbowl run. The problem with Kirk Cousins is that he was a terrible fit on this team, and the front office made a fire-able offense in backing up the Brinks truck for him (twice).

I know I will surprise many when I reveal this well-hidden fact, but the Vikings OL has not been good for quite some time. In fact it's been close to 10 years now since the last time the line was anything close to what I would consider an asset to the team, and in the interim it has varied between bottoming out at historically, comically bad in 2016 to merely below average in 2017 and 2019.

So when I say he was a poor fit for this offense, I'm not talking about his fit as a person, though I do think having the personality of tapioca pudding makes for a poor leader on the football field. I'm talking about how his strengths and weaknesses as a player line up with the offense he was handsomely paid to lead. Specifically, going back to the beginning of his career, Cousins has always been known for being a statue with what we'll generously call sub-par pocket presence.

When Spielman and co. were deciding what to do at the QB position after 2017, they elected to go with a QB who had led the league in fumbles for the prior three years. To make that decision knowing their offensive line couldn't pass block is highly questionable. To make Cousins among the highest-paid QBs in history knowing his most glaring weaknesses will be made all the more vulnerable by the team around him is sheer football negligence. It's as if they just thought "Good QB + good skill position players = good offense, let's pay this guy whatever he wants," with absolutely no thought to the nuance of fitting his talents in with the team around him.

So with his salary added to their cap number, the team was effectively maxed out and couldn't do anything meaningful to fix the problems that manifested throughout 2018 and 2019. They had no avenues to making upgrades to the team outside the draft (where Spielman has been remarkably poor in the early rounds in recent years). To make matters worse, their blind loyalty to other poor performers led to some other obscene contracts that meant every offseason became a delicate balancing act of shuffling money just to keep the team above average. In no reasonable universe should Barr, Rudolph, or Reiff be among the highest paid at their position.

With no money to bring in free agents, generally poor drafting, and constantly kicking the salary cap can down the road, the defense slowly degraded. It went from elite in 2017 to good in 2018 to merely average in 2019. By the time we got to 2020 the cap situation had gotten so dire that we had to purge any contract that was deemed even remotely over-valued, so long as the dead cap wasn't too prohibitive. Gone were guys like Linval, Everson, Alexander, and Waynes. They may not have been elite players, but they were solid contributors at positions that are now filled by either unprepared rookies or scrubs who have no business being in a starting lineup.

Which brings us to today, watching what will assuredly be the end of the Zimmer/Spielman regime. It will probably survive to the end of the season, but not any longer than that. They will leave behind a bloated roster, full of overpaid players at unimportant positions that will take at least two years to fix. And that will be the inevitable cause of death for this era of Vikings football: An insistence on paying above average players like they were elite.

This FanPost was created by a registered user of The Daily Norseman, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff of the site. However, since this is a community, that view is no less important.