Minnesota Vikings Season Review

Two weeks remain in the season, but for the Minnesota Vikings it is already over. Despite a game effort in the second half, they have been eliminated from the playoffs. The next two weeks will be an opportunity to examine the talent available on their roster, potentially play spoiler, and send off the Metrodome in the best way possible.

Vikings fans are understandably upset with the way this season turned out. After a 10-6 playoff run last year, many had expectations for a similar result this season. I wasn’t quite that high on this team before the season, but I didn’t expect it to turn out this dreadfully. Both the offense and the defense have been a disaster for most of the season, and the team has struggled its way to a 4-9-1 record. Unless they win both of their remaining games, they will be selecting in the top ten of the 2014 NFL Draft.

So what went wrong? How did this season fall apart? Most people point to the cycle of mediocrity at the quarterback position, and I’ll get to that at length later. But first I want to discuss what I believe is the true reason for their failure.

In 2008 the Minnesota Vikings traded their first round pick, seventeenth overall, as part of a package to acquire Jared Allen. In 2009 they used their first round pick to select Percy Harvin, who they traded away this past offseason. In 2010 they had the thirtieth overall pick and moved down to number thirty-four to select Chris Cook. Those three years, 2008-2010, are the years to produce the players currently in the prime of their careers. Those were the years that gave the league first rounders Matt Ryan, Jerod Mayo, Ryan Clady, Brandon Albert, Aqib Talib, Duane Brown, Matthew Stafford, Michael Crabtree, Clay Matthews, Ndamukong Suh, Gerald McCoy, Russell Okung, Eric Berry, Earl Thomas, Mike Iupati, Maurkice Pouncey, Demaryius Thomas, and Dez Bryant. It gave us later round selections like Matt Forte, DeSean Jackson, Ray Rice, Jamaal Charles, Carl Nicks, Jairus Byrd, LeSean McCoy, Mike Wallace, Henry Melton, Rob Gronkowski, Daryl Washington, Navarro Bowman, Jimmy Graham, Aaron Hernandez (sorry, had to include him), Geno Atkins, Kam Chanellor, and Antonio Brown. These are the players who are running the league right now. And from those years the Vikings don’t have a single of their first round picks on their roster.

Look at the Vikings top players, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Among their best players, only John Sullivan and Adrian Peterson can claim to be in the prime of their career. The rest are either like Matt Kalil, Harrison Smith, and Xavier Rhodes—young and talented players still developing—or like Chad Greenway, Jared Allen, and Kevin Williams—superstars already on a downward trajectory. This roster is built to win either in 2010 or in 2015, and the Vikings are experiencing the turmoil of the intermediate roster turnover. Allen and Williams likely won’t return next season, but players like Rhodes, Sharrif Floyd, and Cordarrelle Patterson will see expanded roles and more productivity.

All that said, I have to discuss the mess they have made of the quarterback position. They have started three different quarterbacks this season: Christian Ponder for nine games, Matt Cassel for four, and Josh Freeman for one. Here are the stats of the three quarterbacks this season (including Freeman’s three games in Tampa Bay.)

Ponder: 63.6%, 170 YPG, 7 TD, 9 INT, 6.9 YPA

Cassel: 61.9%, 208 YPG, 9 TD, 5 INT, 7.8 YPA

Freeman: 42.9%, 190 YPG, 2 TD, 4 INT, 5.2 YPA

Looking at the stats (and at their level of play on the field) it’s clear that Matt Cassel has been the best quarterback on the Vikings’ roster this season. Many disgruntled Vikings fans are asking why he was not the starter earlier in the season, before things slipped away. They question why he was benched in favor of Josh Freeman in week seven and why the team went back to Ponder after Freeman suffered a concussion. They believe, with some reason, that Cassel would have been enough to make a difference in the three last second defeats they suffered with Ponder as the starter.

But thinking in hindsight is always flawed. We have to go back and try to put ourselves in the mindset of the coaches as they were making these decisions. The Vikings brought in Cassel after Joe Webb’s disastrous playoff start last year made it clear that they could not possibly go another season without a suitable backup. They also wanted him as a option in case their third year quarterback faltered. They were willing to put up with some inconsistency last year, Ponder’s first full season as a starter, but this year they wanted to have a the option to bench him if they felt the team needed it. They signed Cassel to a two year contract worth $7.4 million and made it clear from day one that he was there as a backup, not as competition. This upset some Vikings fans, but if you look at each player’s stats from 2012 it is clear who the better quarterback was last season.

Ponder: 63.1%, 183 YPG, 18 TD, 12 INT, 6.1 YPA

Cassel: 58.1%, 200 YPG, 6 TD, 12 INT, 6.5 YPA

Cassel was an utter disaster for the Chiefs, a primary reason for their 2-14 season. When he went down injured in week 5, the Kansas City fans cheered at the sight of Brady Quinn coming in as his replacement. Coming into training camp no one had any reason to believe he was a better option than Ponder, and he did nothing to prove his superiority during the preseason.

Ponder, on the other hand, was coming off a 2012 season in which he led the Vikings to the playoffs. Adrian Peterson received much of the credit for the team’s playoff run—as he should have—but during the final four weeks of the regular season only Peyton Manning had a higher Total QBR than Ponder. The season turned around when he started playing well, and the Vikings were hoping to see him sustain that level of success. They were hoping to get the Good Ponder from the first four and last four games of the season rather than the Bad Ponder from the middle eight.

Good Ponder: 64.9%, 182 YPG, 8 TD, 1 INT, 6.5 YPA

Bad Ponder: 59.8%, 185 YPG, 10 TD, 11 INT, 5.7 YPA

What they got from Ponder through the first three weeks was, unfortunately, Bad Ponder. Following three straight losses to start the season, no one was particularly upset when an injury forced them to start Cassel. His first start was a victory in which he put up impressive numbers against the Pittsburgh Steelers, but he followed that with a disastrous outing in a blowout loss to the Carolina Panthers. In retrospect that doesn’t appear so embarrassing. Carolina is a likely playoff team with one of the best defenses in the NFL. But at the time, the victory over the Vikings moved the Panthers to 2-3 on the season. The Vikings were 1-4, almost too far back to even consider a playoff run. This led them to making what I believe was the one true mistake of their quarterback cycle: starting Josh Freeman only a week after signing him. He played as poorly as I can recall seeing a quarterback play, missing open receivers on the rare occasion that he actually found them. He finished 20/53 for 190 yards with no touchdowns and one interception. He also suffered a concussion in the game, forcing the Vikings to choose between Cassel and Ponder for the next start. Here is what they were facing at that point:

Ponder: 59.0%, 230 YPG, 2 TD, 5 INT, 6.9 YPA

Cassel: 69.3%, 245 YPG, 3 TD, 2 INT, 7.1 YPA

Cassel’s stats are better, and you could make a strong case that he deserved to start. I would argue that at 1-5, it was clear by this point that the Vikings’ season wasn’t headed anywhere. The options were playing Cassel—a proven commodity with no long term upside—or Ponder—still possessing faint possibility of being their quarterback of the future. As laughable as that sounds, they had to give Ponder a try. If a team already eliminated from the playoffs believes there is any chance they have a franchise quarterback on their roster, they have to go all in. The quarterback position is too valuable to just continue to plug in mediocrity year in and year out. To be successful in this league, you need stability and success at the quarterback position.

So they made the move to go with Ponder, and it worked out at first. They lost to the Packers, but Ponder played well. He put together a similarly strong performance the next week against the Cowboys, even leading a go ahead drive in the fourth quarter. The next week he threw only four incompletions in a victory over the Redskins. He wasn’t dominating by any stretch of the imagination, but he gave them no reason to bench him in favor of Cassel. His poor performance the following week in Seattle is easily excused, but in the eventual tie with the Packers we saw everything negative we had come to expect from Ponder. His string of steady performances was not enough to make up for the games in which he cost his team any hope of offensive production.

When Ponder went down with an injury early the next week, Cassel came in and led the team to an overtime victory over the Bears. The coaches decided to stick with him, and he rewarded them with a pair of strong performances in a tight loss to the Ravens and an upset victory over the Eagles. At this point, it would be a surprise if anyone else started during the last two games.

So three years after they drafted him, it appears the Vikings are ready to move on from Christian Ponder. And here is where I say something controversial: I don’t think drafting him was a mistake. No, he didn’t develop into what they hoped he could be, and yes, the lost draft pick is costing them just as much as the absence of the picks from 2008 through 2010. But results are not the only thing we need to look at when evaluating a decision. We also need to consider the process.

It is impossible to understate how much a franchise quarterback can mean to a team. Not only is the quarterback the most valuable player on the field, he also has the longest career of any non-kicker/punter. Top quarterbacks can remain elite into their late thirties, as demonstrated by Peyton Manning this season. If you can hit on a franchise quarterback, your team is set for the next decade at least. That is why I still believe the Redskins won’t regret the trade to get RGIII. That is why the Colts will likely be able to go from 1998 to 2025 with fewer than five seasons missing the playoffs.

At the Vikings game this past weekend they honored the best players to ever play in the Metrodome, and Daunte Culpepper was received with a standing ovation. Compare that to Brett Favre, who if he returned to Lambeau would probably receive just as many boos as cheers. Neither quarterback left the city on particularly great terms and Favre is clearly the better player, so why the difference in reception? In the years since Culpepper’s departure the Vikings have cycled through an endless cycle of disappointments while the Packers have moved on from Favre to Aaron Rodgers without even suffering quarterback mediocrity in the middle. They can hate Brett Favre because they are unable to see how much he meant to their team.

In the years between the departure of Culpepper and the drafting of Ponder, the Vikings started the following quarterbacks: Brad Johnson, Tarvaris Jackson, Kelly Holcomb, Brooks Bollinger, Gus Frerotte, Brett Favre, and Joe Webb. They ran through a series of fill in veterans mixed among a second round project in Tarvaris Jackson. The one year they had competent quarterback play, Brett Favre led them to the NFC Championship Game. This was a team that had every reason to believe they were a quarterback away from being a competitive franchise.

Every year when the draft came around they knew they needed a quarterback. But they were never in position to take one. So they shrugged their shoulders, took whoever they believe was the best player available, and decided they would be fine with some veteran journeyman until the next season’s draft. Five drafts passed in this manner, and by the time 2011 rolled around it became impossible to rationalize putting this off any further. So with the twelfth pick they decided to reach for Christian Ponder, a prospect most had ranked late in the first round or early in the second.

Because teams recognize the importance of the quarterback position, it has become almost impossible to get a quality quarterback in the draft without reaching. Andrew Luck and Matt Ryan went in about the right spots, but every other quarterback taken in the past five years has been a reach. EJ Manuel wasn’t a first round player. There were enough questions about how RGIII could translate to the NFL that he should have fallen out of the top five. Ryan Tannehill only had a year and a half of experience playing quarterback at a college level. In 2011, the year Ponder was drafted, there wasn’t a quarterback prospect truly worthy of going in the top twenty. Yet at number twelve, Ponder was the fourth taken. If you want a quarterback, you have to be willing to take a risk and reach for him.

With what we know now, it’s easy to second guess the Vikings’ decision. In the second round of that draft, the Bengals selected Andy Dalton and the 49ers selected Colin Kaepernick. Both have had more success than Ponder during their time in the league. Why didn’t the Vikings take one of them? Well, until this year Dalton had done very little to distance himself from Ponder. His statistics were marginally better, but the difference was small enough that it could be written off as the product of playing with AJ Green compared to the ugly mess the Vikings have had at wide receiver. And it is impossible to say what Kaepernick would have been had he not gone to the 49ers. The player he is now bears little resemblance to the player he was in college, a run first quarterback in a pistol system. Would he have been as good as he is now without the tutelage of Jim Harbaugh, a former NFL quarterback and one of the best coaches in the league? It’s hard to say what would have happened had he been taken by the Vikings.

If Ponder had been an utter disaster along the lines of Blaine Gabbert, it would be reasonable to say that the team had no idea what they were doing when they took him. But despite what many Vikings fans believe, Ponder has shown flashes of being a capable NFL quarterback. He’s been inconsistent, but a team can live with an inconsistent quarterback in this league, as evidenced by the success of Joe Flacco, Tony Romo, and Eli Manning. These players succeed because at their best they are every bit as good as the top quarterbacks in the league. Ponder has shown no ability to play at that elite level. At his best, he is a game manager. You can live with a consistent game manager like Alex Smith. You can live with a quarterback who oscillates between great and terrible like Joe Flacco. But you cannot succeed with an inconsistent quarterback who is merely above average when at his best. This is why the Vikings have to move on from Ponder when the season comes to an end.