Having never played football, I really have no 'eye test' to go on, but being an engineer, I do enjoy a dive into numbers.
One thing I determined back in the early 2000's is that one cannot rely on absolute numbers to determine a good defense. One season we got off to a hot start, and our defense looked superb. However, in studying the stats that season, it seemed that we played a lot of bad offensive teams, and we seemed to have an absurd number of TO's. Midseason, we hit a string of outstanding offenses and our turnovers evaporated and so did our supposedly good defense. When comparing the Vikings performance that season against the opposing team offensive average, one found that in nearly every case we *underperformed* against that average on defense. So while on an absolute scale, our numbers were awesome, relative to how the opposing teams normally did-- they did even better against us.
So I've used this metric numerous times since then and it generally bears reasonably accurate for assessing the true quality of a defense.
So how are the Vikings doing this season??
First of all, I love http://www.pro-football-reference.com and their querying tools as it helps a lot in getting at the data you want to see. So all the data here is pretty much from that site. I'll include the link to the query when appropriate.
First of all, let's look at this season's opponents
click here for the actual table on pro-football-reference.com.
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Passing Rushing Tot Yds & TO
Tm Year G W L T W-L% Cmp Att Cmp% Yds TD Int Sk Yds Rate NY/A Att Yds Y/A TD Tot Ply Y/P DPly DY/P TO ToP
TEN 2016 1 0 1 0 0 25 41 61 252 2 1 2 19 86.5 5.8605 22 64 2.91 0 316 65 4.8615 61 4.9344 3 0:30:25
GNB 2016 1 0 1 0 0 20 36 55.6 180 1 1 5 33 70.7 4.3902 23 83 3.61 1 263 64 4.1094 57 4.9825 3 0:29:42
CAR 2016 1 0 1 0 0 22 36 61.1 201 0 3 8 64 49 4.5682 28 105 3.75 1 306 72 4.25 54 3.9074 3 0:34:52
NYG 2016 1 0 1 0 0 25 45 55.6 261 0 1 0 0 63.3 5.8 18 78 4.33 1 339 63 5.381 69 5.3043 2 0:24:28
HOU 2016 1 0 1 0 0 19 42 45.2 155 1 1 4 29 56.1 3.3696 14 59 4.21 0 214 60 3.5667 69 5.087 1 0:22:32
This link points to how opposing teams have fared against us in the Zimmer era
But reading the Eagle Fan Forum points, most folks deprecate these numbers by claiming that we haven't beaten the best of teams.
So I go here to see how these teams have done (unfortunately including the Vikings as excluding just that one game seems beyond the query capabilities of the site). Also I couldn't figure out how to pick just these 5 teams in this order, so I had to do some editing in excel to get this trimmed output
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Passing Rushing Tot Yds & TO
Tm Year G W L T W-L% Cmp Att Cmp% Yds TD Int Sk Yds Rate NY/A Att Yds Y/A TD Tot Ply Y/P DPly DY/P TO ToP
TEN 2016 6 3 3 0 0.5 117 189 61.9 1317 10 6 9 55 88.3 6.6515 179 880 4.92 5 2197 377 5.8276 355 5.4761 9 3:11:40
GNB 2016 6 4 2 0 0.667 148 237 62.4 1436 13 4 11 60 91.7 5.7903 151 629 4.17 2 2065 399 5.1754 353 5.3371 10 3:09:36
CAR 2016 6 1 5 0 0.167 140 232 60.3 1640 10 10 15 109 80.2 6.6397 164 726 4.43 7 2366 411 5.7567 380 5.8658 16 3:06:12
NYG 2016 6 3 3 0 0.5 151 233 64.8 1729 8 6 11 59 88.8 7.0861 127 456 3.59 3 2185 371 5.8895 424 5.1462 13 2:36:44
HOU 2016 6 4 2 0 0.667 134 227 59 1299 8 8 12 103 74.1 5.4351 162 667 4.12 1 1966 401 4.9027 371 5.1051 10 3:02:47
Finally, with the above two tables in excel, I wrote a calculation to exclude the Vikings numbers from the total numbers and take the Vikings numbers as a percent of all other opponents.
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Passing Rushing Tot Yds & TO
Tm Year G W L T W-L% Cmp Att Cmp% Yds TD Int Sk Yds Rate NY/A Att Yds Y/A TD Tot Ply Y/P DPly DY/P TO
TEN 2016 6 3 3 0 0.5 135.9% 138.5% 98.3% 118.3% 125.0% 100.0% 142.9% 263.9% 98.0% 87.9% 70.1% 39.2% 54.7% 0.0% 84.0% 104.2% 81.0% 103.7% 90.1% 250.0%
GNB 2016 6 4 2 0 0.67 78.1% 89.6% 87.2% 71.7% 41.7% 166.7% 416.7% 611.1% 77.0% 75.5% 89.8% 76.0% 82.9% 500.0% 73.0% 95.5% 76.1% 96.3% 93.3% 214.3%
CAR 2016 6 1 5 0 0.17 93.2% 91.8% 101.6% 69.8% 0.0% 214.3% 571.4% 711.1% 61.0% 68.4% 102.9% 84.5% 83.2% 83.3% 74.3% 106.2% 70.6% 82.8% 66.6% 115.4%
NYG 2016 6 3 3 0 0.5 99.2% 119.7% 83.4% 88.9% 0.0% 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 71.2% 81.6% 82.6% 103.2% 125.8% 250.0% 91.8% 102.3% 90.1% 97.2% 103.1% 90.9%
HOU 2016 6 4 2 0 0.67 82.6% 113.5% 73.2% 67.7% 71.4% 71.4% 250.0% 195.9% 75.6% 61.6% 47.3% 48.5% 102.5% 0.0% 61.1% 88.0% 68.5% 114.2% 99.6% 55.6%
TEN passed a whole lot more than usual against us, probably because we shut down their preferred running attack. Still we held them to only 84% of the total yards they normally enjoy.
Seems our Y/A rushing allowed has eroded over the season, but I'm not sure that is a source for worry-- our two most convincing victories have come in these past 2 games, giving up just 23 points while scoring 55. Also, in these last 2 games we've relied far less on TO.
Our TO percent vs opposing average has declined every week. A bit of a puzzler, but winning dominantly with fewer TO's is only a positive in my book. Probably the book on beating MN is don't turn the ball over and try to run as much as possible. Well, it hasn't worked for either NYG or HOU even though it would seem they had some success in these areas. If anything, this seems most concerning in the whole analysis.
All this shows what we already know-- we have a quality defense. But we've had years when this same analysis revealed that it was really more a matter of who we played than how well we played.
I certainly hope we can keep this up!