2018 Minnesota Vikings failed season.

[FullWood]

In lewd of today's game to end the season. What exactly went wrong? Why couldn't we repeat last year's success? With high expectations I was excited about this season and even thou this has happened many times to us I felt like we could get back to where we were. So what exactly happened?

Was it losing Keenum, Mckinnon, Lamur, Brock, Newman, Berger, Robinson, Stephens, J Wright, Forbath?

Was it our weak kicking and bad off season additions in the draft, free agency, or injuries?

What about our personnel? Is losing Soprano and Shurmur a big difference? Is Zimmer not the guy for us?

Did those guys make a difference? Were we wrong about Cousins?

Who is responsible for this failed season?

Who failed this city?

[PurpleMustReign]

Spielman didn't address the OL adequately. Losing Berger and Easton were huge.
Mike Zimmer has lost interest. I am thinking he will retire now. He isn't having fun. His players don't want to listen to him and aren't playing with fire in the important games.
It's time for a change, and I honestly don't understand how anyone can argue against that.
The OL was bad. Epically bad. I Get it. That's on Spielman. So is signing an $84 million statue. The defense didn't perform when they had to. That's on Zimmer.

[Mothman]

Spielman didn't address the OL adequately. Losing Berger and Easton were huge.
Mike Zimmer has lost interest. I am thinking he will retire now. He isn't having fun. His players don't want to listen to him and aren't playing with fire in the important games.
It's time for a change, and I honestly don't understand how anyone can argue against that.

When a team with Super Bowl aspirations plays the way the Vikings did this season, particularly after the bye (and especially today, with the playoffs on the line), it's clearly time for change at the top. It's time to replace Zimmer and Spielman and that's just the beginning of what needs to happen. 5 years is plenty of time and today's lackluster performance made the need for major change clear.

Defilippo was a scapegoat (not that he did a terribly good job). Stefanski wasn't a savior. Cousins wasn't the missing piece. The offensive line was a disaster... again. They couldn't even block the Bears backups late in today's game when the Vikes still had a chance to win.

The team is dysfunctional. It starts at the top and today's lackluster performance showed just how seriously major change is needed. The loss was understandable (Chicago is good). The lack of fire and level of performance was wholly unacceptable.

[PurpleMustReign]

Spielman didn't address the OL adequately. Losing Berger and Easton were huge.
Mike Zimmer has lost interest. I am thinking he will retire now. He isn't having fun. His players don't want to listen to him and aren't playing with fire in the important games.
It's time for a change, and I honestly don't understand how anyone can argue against that.

When a team with Super Bowl aspirations plays the way the Vikings did this season, particularly after the bye (and especially today, with the playoffs on the line), it's clearly time for change at the top. It's time to replace Zimmer and Spielman and that's just the beginning of what needs to happen. 5 years is plenty of time and today's lackluster performance made the need for major change clear.

Defilippo was a scapegoat (not that he did a terribly good job). Stefanski wasn't a savior. Cousins wasn't the missing piece. The offensive line was a disaster... again. They couldn't even block the Bears backups late in today's game when the Vikes still had a chance to win.

The team is dysfunctional. It starts at the top and today's lackluster performance showed just how seriously major change is needed. The loss was understandable (Chicago is good). The lack of fire and level of performance was wholly unacceptable.

I would say thst the ralent we have in everything UT the OL is young enough that the window isn't closed, but it needs an enormous change now.
To me the fame was over on the long run by Howard. It amazed me when Harrison Smith, arguably our best defensive player , spun around like a rookie who did not ever see a football game in the past. That was absolutely embarrassing and all on the coaches for not getting him fired up. Yes Smith deserve some blame for that, but that reminded me of the defenses that Leslie Frazier hat. It was completely the end of the game as far as I'm concerned.

[VikeFanInEagleLand]

First...read my feelings in the Mike Zimmer thread about what I feel to be his inability to emotionally and mentally be prepared and have his team prepared to play in a big game. I have been involved in a lot of back and forth discussions about Cousins vs. Keenum, and I just want to say that I lay very little of this loss at the feet of Cousins. What I will say though is a certain thing that Keenum brought to this team was a confidence that they can win. His attitude was contagious. It made up for the lack of that from the coaching staff. With Keenum gone, he was replaced by a guy who doesn't exude much confidence. I realize that professional football players shouldn't need external motivation to play at 100%, but it happens. This wasn't a game that would have been won by any other QB in the league by game play. It may have been won by a QB (or coaching staff) that had the team absolutely believing that this was a Super Bowl quality team. In actuality, it was probably lost before the first snap.

[Mothman]

I would say thst the ralent we have in everything UT the OL is young enough that the window isn't closed, but it needs an enormous change now.

Honestly, I'm not sure the window was ever open much more than a crack.

[vikeinmontana]

Spielman didn't address the OL adequately. Losing Berger and Easton were huge.
Mike Zimmer has lost interest. I am thinking he will retire now. He isn't having fun. His players don't want to listen to him and aren't playing with fire in the important games.
It's time for a change, and I honestly don't understand how anyone can argue against that.
The OL was bad. Epically bad. I Get it. That's on Spielman. So is signing an $84 million statue. The defense didn't perform when they had to. That's on Zimmer.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall opinion. But it’s a real slippery slope to throw out comments like the coach lost interest, isn’t having fun, and is going to retire. There’s just no real way for these kinds of comments to hold truth unless you’re part of the team. If we go this route, we could literally throw out these same blanket statements about every position and player/coach on the roster!

I feel this team has MANY areas of concern. Our head coach not being interested might not crack the top 20.

Please don’t take this as an attack on you. I love your posts. I just hate to see people making assumptions on things they couldn’t possibly know.

[MrPurplenGold]

The team is dysfunctional.

I would say dysfunctional is probably an emotional overreaction. We were without Rhodes and Kendricks on the defensive side of the ball plus holton hill went out at one point. I would say the Vikings swung big and missed big at the QB position and it cost them. They tried remmers at guard and it is a failed experiment at this point.

Positives: Vikings have several young stars on the offensive and defensive side of the ball. In 5 years zimmer has had only 1 year under .500 and that was his first year. Looks like the Vikings have a pretty good player in Holton Hill who was an UDFA and Brian O'Neill seems like he is going to be the best offensive lineman that we have. While speilman has some serious misses, in particular at the QB and OLine, he has found several stars in the later rounds.

Negatives: tony sparano died before the season started and elflein missed all of training camp. That definitely hurt the offensive lines performance. this team isn't built for the skillset cousins has. He needs others around him to make him great. He doesn't seem like the type of QB that can hide deficiencies in the OLine and he had a pretty heated conversation with theilen on the sideline which makes me wonder if his personality won't rub people the wrong way. We have several pending free agents that are currently starters that we may not be able to resign without restructuring contracts or cutting existing starters which only creates more holes on the roster.


All in all this team is better than most teams in the league but isn't at or near the top in coaching or talent at the QB position and those are definitely things that matter the most. Will changes at the top make things better, who knows. The hottest head coaching candidate was fired by zimmer midseason. So unless there's the next mcvay or matt nagy that the vikings can hire, i say stick with what we have.

[PurpleMustReign]

I would say thst the ralent we have in everything UT the OL is young enough that the window isn't closed, but it needs an enormous change now.

Honestly, I'm not sure the window was ever open much more than a crack.

That's fair. But to Landon's point from another thread, you don't need a dominant defense anymore in the NFL. You need an above-average defense complemented with a with a good offense. The talent is there on this team. However, they need an offensive line badly. I say let Barr and Richardson walk, and look to trade Waynes or Alexander for an OL, and draft nothing but OL for the first three rounds. Then, get a NT. Then more OL.

[S197]

In lewd of today's game to end the season. What exactly went wrong? Why couldn't we repeat last year's success? With high expectations I was excited about this season and even thou this has happened many times to us I felt like we could get back to where we were. So what exactly happened?

Was it losing Keenum, Mckinnon, Lamur, Brock, Newman, Berger, Robinson, Stephens, J Wright, Forbath?

Was it our weak kicking and bad off season additions in the draft, free agency, or injuries?

What about our personnel? Is losing Soprano and Shurmur a big difference? Is Zimmer not the guy for us?

Did those guys make a difference? Were we wrong about Cousins?

Who is responsible for this failed season?

Who failed this city?

Cousins looked exceedingly average, maybe worse when compared to his paycheck, and that sucks but he's here for another two years. I think he's shell shocked and honestly, rightly so with the beating he took this year. I'm surprised he made it 16 games. I'd rather focus on what we can do rather than #### about things we can't change.

I did not think our OL could look worse than last year, then Rick proceeded to say, "hold my beer" while he #### up a draft an idiot armchair GM like myself could have done. Chicago was getting 5-7 yards a clip on first down running the ball. We get the ball and it's zero, zero, holding calls. It wasn't magic that our one TD score was when we had a semblance of a run game. It set up a great play action to Thielen for a 1st, a swing pass to Cook, and ultimately the TD to Diggs. The fact that this OL can't pass protect or run block is embarrassing. Hell, even on the last series Reiff is letting backup DEs blow by him. Remmers is so bad he needs to be cut before he leaves the locker room. It takes a special type of terrible to allow a pressure while holding but Remmers turns it into a weekly thing when he isn't getting the playcall wrong and letting defenders jailbreak Cousins because he thinks it's a screen. Compton does his best to dethrone Remmers as most incompetent and honestly it's probably the best battle we've seen all season. The only saving grace is no one broke their ankle this blowout because O'Neill and Elflein need an offseason of strength training.

Defense I addressed in the other thread but we simply have the wrong strategy. Way too much emphasis on defense. We can't afford nor need 11 superstars and depth 1st round picks. It's dumb, this isn't 2000, you're not getting another elite Ravens/Broncos type D anymore. Seattle is in and we're not, what's the difference? They fixed their OL and let their defense go. We did the exact opposite.

What happens next depends on how well Rick and Zimmer can see their mistakes. They're REALLY obvious. Like Mike Priefer is a horrible coach obvious. If they see what they did wrong, maybe this ship gets righted but if they sit there scratching their heads in press conferences, fire them both before they leave the podium. What made this season bad was not the outcome, it's the outcome could be seen in April and we kept waiting for adjustments and they never came.

[PurpleMustReign]

Spielman didn't address the OL adequately. Losing Berger and Easton were huge.
Mike Zimmer has lost interest. I am thinking he will retire now. He isn't having fun. His players don't want to listen to him and aren't playing with fire in the important games.
It's time for a change, and I honestly don't understand how anyone can argue against that.
The OL was bad. Epically bad. I Get it. That's on Spielman. So is signing an $84 million statue. The defense didn't perform when they had to. That's on Zimmer.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall opinion. But it’s a real slippery slope to throw out comments like the coach lost interest, isn’t having fun, and is going to retire. There’s just no real way for these kinds of comments to hold truth unless you’re part of the team. If we go this route, we could literally throw out these same blanket statements about every position and player/coach on the roster!

I feel this team has MANY areas of concern. Our head coach not being interested might not crack the top 20.

Please don’t take this as an attack on you. I love your posts. I just hate to see people making assumptions on things they couldn’t possibly know.

I got it. And I'm not assuming anything or accusing anything, it's just an observation that I made this here and that someone else echoed earlier. Zimmer hasn't looked the same since his eye injury. I wonder how much that affected him overall. The look on his face this year was different than in years past. I don't know exactly what it was that I saw, but it just look different

[PurpleMustReign]

I forgot... Fire Mike Priefer. How many failed kickers does it take to realize that he is worthless and detrimental to the team? Bailey was 21 of 28 on FGs this season... He was the second most accurate kicker in NFL history!
Matt Wile was about the only positive about the special teams this season (and Marcus Sherels). I am sick of being on edge for all of our kicks.

[Mothman]

I would say dysfunctional is probably an emotional overreaction.

I understand why you might think that but I'd have to be feeling emotional for that to be the case and honestly, I'm not emotional right now. I'm not particularly upset about the loss because I didn't believe this year's Vikes could do any real damage in the postseason anyway. Intellectually, I could acknowledge the possibility but having watched them play all year, I never really believed they'd be able to to "turn it on", get hot and make a postseason run. Plus, my opinion about the team's dysfunction wasn't formed today, in the wake of this loss. It's an opinion I've held for a LONG time and it's been reinforced this season.

[VikeFanInEagleLand]

I would say dysfunctional is probably an emotional overreaction. We were without Rhodes and Kendricks on the defensive side of the ball plus holton hill went out at one point. I would say the Vikings swung big and missed big at the QB position and it cost them. They tried remmers at guard and it is a failed experiment at this point.

Positives: Vikings have several young stars on the offensive and defensive side of the ball. In 5 years zimmer has had only 1 year under .500 and that was his first year. Looks like the Vikings have a pretty good player in Holton Hill who was an UDFA and Brian O'Neill seems like he is going to be the best offensive lineman that we have. While speilman has some serious misses, in particular at the QB and OLine, he has found several stars in the later rounds.

Negatives: tony sparano died before the season started and elflein missed all of training camp. That definitely hurt the offensive lines performance. this team isn't built for the skillset cousins has. He needs others around him to make him great. He doesn't seem like the type of QB that can hide deficiencies in the OLine and he had a pretty heated conversation with theilen on the sideline which makes me wonder if his personality won't rub people the wrong way. We have several pending free agents that are currently starters that we may not be able to resign without restructuring contracts or cutting existing starters which only creates more holes on the roster.


All in all this team is better than most teams in the league but isn't at or near the top in coaching or talent at the QB position and those are definitely things that matter the most. Will changes at the top make things better, who knows. The hottest head coaching candidate was fired by zimmer midseason. So unless there's the next mcvay or matt nagy that the vikings can hire, i say stick with what we have.

I know it always seems that I am trashing Cousins when I say this, but I'm really not. I am trying to be unbiased....realistic in my critique on him. He has the tools, BUT in my opinion, he doesn't have the emotional makeup to be a winner. AND to your point, he needs others around him to use the tools he does have. That's why I was critical of bringing him here. Why replace one QB that also needs elements around him (who I feel has a much better winning attitude which is contagious) with another QB that needs the same thing but doesn't have that winning demeanor?

To the point that others have made about Zimmer not seeming as fired up this season...tired. That COULD have a lot to do with Sparano dying before the season. Maybe it's mentally wearing on him. It could have affected him more than we know. I mean, it seems every year it starts out with something tragic happening. (injuries and such)

This team does obviously have talent. If they have any prayer going forward they must fix the OL. I am disappointed but not surprised unfortunately.

[vikeinmontana]

I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall opinion. But it’s a real slippery slope to throw out comments like the coach lost interest, isn’t having fun, and is going to retire. There’s just no real way for these kinds of comments to hold truth unless you’re part of the team. If we go this route, we could literally throw out these same blanket statements about every position and player/coach on the roster!

I feel this team has MANY areas of concern. Our head coach not being interested might not crack the top 20.

Please don’t take this as an attack on you. I love your posts. I just hate to see people making assumptions on things they couldn’t possibly know.

I got it. And I'm not assuming anything or accusing anything, it's just an observation that I made this here and that someone else echoed earlier. Zimmer hasn't looked the same since his eye injury. I wonder how much that affected him overall. The look on his face this year was different than in years past. I don't know exactly what it was that I saw, but it just look different

I agree with that. Our entire look as a team was different for sure. Tough to pinpoint but lots of blame to go around unfortunately.