J. Kapp 11 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 29, 2021 2:51 pm
I hope you all understand ... my OP was not really an account of who I thought was to blame for yesterday. I'm not blaming Cousins ... well, not ONLY Cousins.
My point about Cousins is this.
It's one thing to be clutch when your team is playing well. When everything is going mostly right. When your offense is clicking, like it was against Green Bay. Lots of good quarterbacks can come through in the clutch in those situations.
What takes you over the top to become GREAT is the ability to save your team when it doesn't have its best stuff.
Yeah, we can blame Mike Zimmer for the inability to stop the run. But you know what? We all KNEW going into that game that we were going to struggle stopping their ground game. We knew that if we were going to beat the 49ers, the Vikings would have to score. It was no surprise, at least not to me, that the 49ers put up 30+. The Vikings' defense was severely undermanned, especially in the area that could most likely stop their ground game — the defensive line.
As poorly as our defense played — and it was abysmal — the Vikings STILL had MULTIPLE chances to win that game. And each and every time they had a chance, they panicked. Kirk Cousins panicked.
Again, it's what you do when the sh!t is flying around you and your team's back is against the wall that measures your greatness as a quarterback.
Do any of you think there's a snowball's chance in hell that Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers lines up under the right guard on 4th-and-goal with the game on the line? Look at the TEAM in that situation. They didn't line up correctly. There was some confusion as to what the play was. Our second-string running back had to remind our $35 million quarterback that Oli Udoh doesn't snap the ball. Where is the calm in the storm? Where is the "Don't worry, I got this"? Instead, we get Maxwell Smart and the Chief:
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "I don't know. Were you thinking 'Holy sh!t, holy sh!t, a swordfish almost went through my head?' If so, then yes."
It was a mess. A Chinese fire drill instead of a 2-minute drill. Pretty much how it usually is in those situations with every Mike Zimmer coached team in the 8 years he's been our coach. In virtually every late-game situation, we panic. We line up incorrectly. We scramble. We look like we don't know what we're doing. Because we don't. That's coaching. That's the quarterback. That's the players (on both sides of the ball). It's everything. Again, we did fine when it was Detroit at home, or when everything was working like the Packers game. But when there's a chance to win in an otherwise crappy game, forget it.
Yesterday did two things for me.
1. It firmly established that Kirk Cousins is NOT on the top tier when it comes to NFL quarterbacks.
He's a gifted passer. He's well prepared. He commands a reasonable amount of respect from his teammates. But he's not great, and he's not great because he can't get past who he is ... somebody who follows a script. It's like the Lego Movie. Are you a guy who needs the instructions, or can you improvise? It's all got to go right for Cousins to shine. And he doesn't lift his team when the boat is sinking in the sh!tstorm.
2. It showed me how broken the organization is from top to bottom — it's dysfunctional beyond repair.
From the front office to the coach to the players, there is something very wrong with this team. The coach wants to play a certain way, but his way is outmoded. The GM wants to stockpile Day 3 draft picks instead of finding true difference makers. Probably because his coach loathes superstars. The quarterback desperately needs to be loved and coddled, which his coach (who never wanted him) isn't about to do. There's no cohesion, no alignment of purpose. Nothing. It's so broken, and it's not repairable.
Somebody asked on a call-in show today whether the Vikings could contend with Zimmer and Cousins if Zimmer were to hire a true innovator on offense, then get out of the way and let them shine. My answer is an unqualified NO. As I stated in some detail in another thread, Zimmer and Cousins cannot coexist in the same football universe. Whose fault is that? I don't care.
My personal preference would be to start over. All of them, from Spielman on down, fired. They've been doing this slight-of-hand with the fans for too long, where they make you believe they can contend with this pickup and that (Dalvin Tomlinson, Bashaud Breeland come to mind) and stay just close enough in games, even against the best teams, to give you hope. But it's Lucy and the football.
This iteration of the Minnesota Vikings organization is broken. It can't be fixed. Toss it in the trash, open the Amazon app and order a new one.
