10-04-2017, 04:46 PM
Quote: @Jor-El said:Yes it is Zimmer's first time as a Head coach. But unlike Childress, Zimmer seems to learn from his mistakes.
I know all that (and btw didn't take any of this personally) - I said, we could do far worse, a la Frazier or Tice. It's not a set of extremes, where our coach is either great or terrible. But we Vikings fans have an expectation that we should have a team that contends for the division title and more. From Bud Grant's first season until 2000, we made the playoffs 23 out of 34 years, won 57% of our regular season games, went to 9 NFC Championship games and 4 Super Bowls.
But that was all in the last century. The Vikings fired Dennis Green because he only took the team to the playoffs in 8 of his 10 seasons - and many fans were glad to see him go, the man won no Super Bowls! THAT is, in my opinion, the defining aspect of Viking fandom: we are not happy with anything but championships. We fired a coach who was 97-63 with a playoff appearance rate of 80% - and you are surprised that Zimmer, with 1 winning season and a loss in the wildcard round, is being questioned??
It's sad but I'm beginning to accept that maybe we are never going to recapture the "glory years". We're not a dumpster fire of a franchise and can be glad of that. But since Green left the Vikings are 123-132-1. We're just one of those teams that linger around .500, a lot of 7-9 or 8-8 years. Have we had bad breaks? Sure, but all teams do. Denny never had a multi-year "franchise quarterback" - he was winning with Gannon, Salisbury, Moon, George, McMahon, Johnson, Cunningham, Culpepper. Burns had Kramer for a few years but Steve Dils and Wade Wilson too. He survived the Herschel Walker trade and didn't beg to get a few years crossed off as "mulligans".
Winning franchises overcome their injuries and player problems, but losing teams just make a list of excuses and tell themselves fate conspired against them.
As for Zimmer, IMO he came here with a bunch of weaknesses, and that's most likely why he got passed over by other teams repeatedly. Those other teams were not all just dumber than the Vikings, folks. Zimmer is suprisingly weak at clock management, dealing with the press, and ignored the offensive side of the ball for 2+ years. Those are pretty stupid mistakes for a guy coaching in the NFL for two decades. Most of the good NFL coaches had a first head coaching job that they made mistakes in (Belichick, Carroll, etc) but they got better when they got a second chance. This is Zimmer's rookie job and he won't likely get another.
And - I'll try to keep this part short because everyone else seems to want to just label Zimmer's defense as great/elite - I don't think Zimmer is an amazing "defensive guru". He has built a good defense, and it looks great compared to Les Frazier's. But when our offense is sputtering, does our defense ever stifle an opponent and carry us to a win? I mean really stifle, not 14 points. Do we have games where our defense gets big plays and turnovers and scores by itself and sets the tone for the team? Nope. The standard our defense is playing towards is, "we should win IF our offense scores 21 or more". Look at Zimmer's historic defensive rankings before coming here and it's obvious why no one thought his defensive genius was enough to overlook all his other flaws.
Zimmer has not put together a streak of 2+ wins since the 5-0 start; that's a pretty critical test of preparing and leading and building a winning attitude on the squad. In the next 4 weeks he has 2 home games and 2 road games against the Bears and Browns. That's a great opportunity to get momentum for this team. Will they do that - or will they hang their heads and say, "Bradford's out, Cook's out, it's hard to prepare for Trubisky without any game tape, poor us, it's so unfair, boo hoo..." ??
As to his defenses, I classify them as elite. He is innovative. That is surprisingly rare at the NFL level. He comes up with new ways to confuse defenses. Look at his success against good QBs like Rodgers, Brees, Rothlisberger. Our D stifles. Did you know that the D gave up one (1) drive over 36 yards against Detroit. For all the "tackling" issues, we sure didn't give up many yards. Abdullah broke a few tackles and made some impressive runs, but not many explosive (20+) plays. Only one drive of theirs was actually a sustained drive.
If the offense doesn't crap the bed and turn over the ball, we would have given up single digit points. As it is, after at least one of the turnovers on our side of the field, the D held to a FG.
I can guarantee the players and coaches aren't boohooing. They won't be looking for excuses. But as fans, we can actually look at the big picture and say, damn that is a tough row.
