Mothman wrote:
I lack that degree of faith in Zimmer's coaching ability, even though I like him and think he's a good coach. Man-to-Man coverage is every bit as exploitable as zone if it's not executed well and Brady and Edelman made that pretty clear yesterday.
What bothered me most about the defensive performance was the lack of pressure and the poor run defense. New England is a good running team but allowing 150 yards on the ground simply isn't getting it done on defense.
The recipe for beating an elite QB has always been moving the chains, being efficient, putting up points, and ball control when you're on offense, unless you have an extremely talented / ELITE defense. We didn't get that yesterday and no we aren't an elite talented defense. In fact we pretty much got the opposite which is not moving the ball well and turning it over as many times as we did.
Every team's players make mistakes or fail to execute at times, even Seattle's defense got trounced last night, that's just football, there is no way to be perfect and dominate that hard so I think you're just way too tough on the players.
Forget about the players for a second and the execution or the talent,
what about yesterday's game made you think "we would have been better off with Frazier?"
Zimmer seems to agree or else he just doesn't think Bridgewater is ready to play but until we see Teddy, I'm not convinced Cassel gives them the best chance to win. Heck, if he delivers another performance like yesterday's I'd rather see Ponder get his shot under Norv than see more of Cassel when he's off. In the past two years I think the Vikes have only had two games with Ponder at QB where the team failed to score more than 14 points. In 8 Cassel starts, they already have 4! Granted, that's an overly simplistic way to look at it but the offense has struggled to score points in half of Cassel's starts now.
I'd love to see Bridgewater start the Falcons game.
That's fair, I would like to see BW too but like I said, I'm not bailing on Cassel after one game against his old team with the AD scandal breaking out 2 days before the game. For Cassel I think it's always been about his consistency and how often you get good matt vs bad matt. Obviously I had hoped under Norv in a favorable system we would see more good matt than bad matt, but another stinker that bad in the next 1-2 games I think you gotta let Teddy take over and start thinking about his Era.
If they stay healthy enough, I think we'll see improvement over the course of the season too but yesterday's results speak for themselves. Between the Peterson situation, a blowout loss and some tough games ahead, we're now going to get a sense of how this coaching staff, and this year's Vikings team, responds to adversity. Maybe that's good?
It's definitely good for the young guys, in my opinion you always learn more after a loss than a blowout win like we had against the Rams. There should be plenty of tape the coaches can show the players and if they're as good as I think they are, they'll start to address the issues and begin working on fixing / improving / getting better at it.
There are three things to consider for this team this year though.
1. We knew going in the schedule would be pretty tough or we were at least facing a lot of good QB's.
2. As is the case with new coaches you get new strategies, schemes, tactics, philosophies, etc. Some of these guys have been playing the way Frazier wanted them to play (and I'm not knocking Frazier here, this is just the absolute truth of it, ANYTIME there is a coaching change and they don't use the exact same systems, they have to adapt to the new ones) so you can expect some growing pains.
3. The team is pretty young so even more reason to expect growing pains.
I know you know about these, as you've posted plenty of times that these very reasons are why you wouldn't predict better than an 8-8 record and I know you don't think they should be PERFECT by week 2! It'll take some time but again, I'm confident we'll get there.
I see differences too but my point was that there were too many similar results, right down to the lack of execution and the lack of forced turnovers. To me, they looked more than capable of being that team that blows 4th quarter leads again. I suspect that's one of those things that's very much in the "eye of the beholder" though. Hopefully, they'll have plenty of 4th quarter leads this year and hopefully, they'll hold onto them.
