Vikings’ Andrew Booth Jr. finally fully healthy, could see time vs. Bills

The second-round pick could finally see some action on defense

The Minnesota Vikings second-round pick Andrew Booth Jr. has had a tough start to his NFL career to say the least. He was injured in the opening game against the Green Bay Packers where he hasn’t played one defensive snap and only 31 special teams snap period.

When speaking to the media on Thursday morning, defensive coordinator Ed Donatell said that Booth Jr. is fully healthy and will be ready if called upon.

The Vikings have been taking a very cautious approach with Booth Jr. He had a core muscle injury that kept him out all offseason. He was always a player that needed some time to develop before throwing him out onto the field, but sitting out due to injury wasn’t what the Vikings were hoping for.

He might not see much time at all, but don’t be surprised if they try to rotate him into the mix on Sunday.

[mm-video type=playlist id=01eqbyjpbajmjvnqmj player_id=none image=https://vikingswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]

Vikings PFF grades on defense entering the bye week

The Vikings PFF grades show that there is still room for improvement

The Minnesota Vikings enter the bye week at 5-1 and sit in a good spot with a two-game lead in the NFC North division.

Despite the immediate success in the first year of the Kevin O’Connell and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah era, the Vikings still have a lot of room to grow. The main area where they should see growth is on the offensive side of the football, but the defense should also see some improvement.

Defensive coordinator Ed Donatell has the defense preventing big plays but they are allowing the opponent to gain yards. In 2021, the Vikings’ defense was 24th in points allowed and 29th in yards allowed. The unit has seen some improvement as they are currently 12th in points allowed and 27th in yards allowed.

On Friday, we took a look at the PFF grades for the offense heading into the bye week. Today, we look at how they stack up on defense.

5 telling stats from Week 6 Vikings vs. Dolphins

These stats were telling from Sunday’s win over the Miami Dolphins

The Minnesota Vikings had an interesting game against the Miami Dolphins on Sunday afternoon. With a 24-16 victory, they scored their first win in Miami since 1976.

As we move forward with the Vikings 2022 season, there are still a lot of questions to be answered. The team is 5-1 with three come-from-behind victories in the fourth quarter.

When we take time to look at the numbers from Sunday’s win, there are five stats that standout. Let’s dive into them.

Zulgad: Vikings’ bye week will give Kevin O’Connell a chance to get busy fixing team’s flaws

From @jzulgad: The Vikings enter the bye week at 5-1 where Kevin O’Connell will have his first chance to self-scout his team

Kevin O’Connell has no opponent to prepare for this week, but that doesn’t mean the Vikings’ first-year coach will be free from watching film or grinding through X’s and O’s. Only, in this case, O’Connell’s focus will be solely on his 5-1 team that has won its past four games by a closer-than-he-would-like average of 5.5 points.

The bye week presents an opportunity for a self-scout in which O’Connell and his coaching staff will dissect everything that has gone right and wrong in the first six weeks. Despite the Vikings’ record, there is plenty to fix and it will be O’Connell’s job to identify and fix as many of those issues as possible.

Ultimately, it might end up being the most important week of the regular season for O’Connell. The Vikings are one of three teams with a 5-1 mark, joining the Bills and Giants, and only trail the Eagles (6-0) for the best record in the NFL.

What’s interesting is the Vikings have been successful — their only defeat came in Week 2 in Philadelphia — while not being dominant and often playing an uneven game on at least one side of the ball. This isn’t uncommon in a league filled with flawed teams but the best teams find ways to fix their biggest issues.

O’Connell has been careful to remain measured in his responses, including following a 24-16 victory Sunday in Miami. Minnesota only held a six-point lead in the fourth quarter before Dalvin Cook’s 53-yard touchdown run. The Dolphins then got a late touchdown.

“I told the team (on Saturday), by this time tomorrow, we’ll have six examples of who we are as a football team,” O’Connell said, “and will we come out of this stadium 5-1 and be able to say we’re a little bit more of a third of the way through our season with different identities? Sometimes it may feel like to Vikings fans, depending on what Sunday it is, but what I would say is we’ve got a tough resilient group that maybe doesn’t always play the most consistent. But they are willing and able to have each other’s backs in all three phases.”

Consistency is the key word. The Vikings’ preparation is not a concern and O’Connell’s leadership has proven to be exactly what the locker room needed. But what remains uncertain is just how close this team, and especially its offense, matches up to what O’Connell envisioned when he left the Rams to take this job.

Sunday’s win was underwhelming from an offensive standpoint with the Dolphins outgaining the Vikings by 224 yards and Kirk Cousins throwing for only 175 yards. A defense that had struggled to get a pass rush, benefitted from some of the Dolphins’ injury issues and recorded six sacks. The Vikings are a respectable 11th in the league in points against, but are 26th in yards surrendered.

While O’Connell’s main focus is on offense, he and defensive coordinator Ed Donatell are likely to pick apart film of the first six games and try to find ways to improve a 3-4 scheme that is 29th in the NFL in passing yards allowed. The pressure the Vikings applied in Miami — Za’Darius Smith and Patrick Jones each had two sacks — was a positive step.

The Vikings will have 11 games remaining coming out of the bye, including six at U.S. Bank Stadium. Considering how weak the NFC appears to be, the Vikings are not only well-positioned to win the North but also contend for a high seed in the playoffs. Minnesota is two games clear of Green Bay, which lost at home to the Jets on Sunday, and actually have a three-game lead because of a Week 1 victory over the Packers.

The Vikings have helped create their own breaks thus far — just as their late-half and late-game meltdowns hurt them last season — but improvement is almost mandatory or regression might be inevitable.

“Obviously it’s right where we want to be,” veteran wide receiver Adam Thielen said of his team’s start. “I think if you asked anybody in this organization or the fanbase if we could be 5-1 at this point before the
season started, I think everyone would be like ‘heck yeah, I’ll do whatever it takes to get to that point,’ right?

“But we know we’ve got to get a lot better. I’ve been on teams that have started fast and not made the playoffs. So we have a lot of guys on this team that have had that experience and know that we have to stay on top of it, we’ve got to keep getting better. The teams that find ways to get better throughout the season are the teams that do things in the end of the season, and that allows them to make the playoffs. We’ve got to take advantage of this bye week and then go back to work.”

It will be a bye week for Thielen and his teammates. For O’Connell, it will be a week in which he has time to correct things that could cost the Vikings later.

Judd Zulgad is co-host of the Purple Daily Podcast and Mackey & Judd podcast at www.skornorth.com

[mm-video type=playlist id=01eqbyjpbajmjvnqmj player_id=none image=https://vikingswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]

Kevin O’Connell awards the entire defense game balls

Kevin O’Connell rewarded the defense for their hard work on Sunday

The Minnesota Vikings navigated their way to another win over the Dolphins by a score of 24-16 despite a poor overall team performance.

The one unit that deserved some praise was the defense. They were on the field a lot due to the offense going three and out 10 times on the day.

The defense did allow 458 yards but only 6.23 yards per play, really testing the bend-don’t-break mantra of defensive coordinator Ed Donatell. The positives of the defense stood out in droves.

Not only did the Vikings force three turnovers that resulted in 10 points but they also had six sacks and 13 quarterback hits.

For their efforts on Sunday, head coach Kevin O’Connell awarded the entire Vikings defense a game ball.

The Vikings are going into the bye week at 5-1 and riding a four-game winning streak thanks to a defense that keeps coming up big at the end of games. On Sunday, they were recognized by head coach Kevin O’Connell.

[mm-video type=playlist id=01eqbyjpbajmjvnqmj player_id=none image=https://vikingswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]

Ed Donatell not too concerned with Danielle Hunter’s slow start

Donatell doesn’t seem concerned with his slow start

After four games, the Minnesota Vikings’ star edge Danielle Hunter has not had the start he was hoping for.

Through those four games, Hunter has one sack and eight pressures. Not great from the player who had 31 pressures and six sacks in the seven games he played in before a season-ending torn pectoral muscle against the San Francisco 49ers.

Part of those struggles equates to a shift to a 3-4 defense. Because of that, defensive coordinator Ed Donatell isn’t concerned.

Donatell makes a really good point. The things that Hunter is being asked to do in this defense are quite a bit different. On standard downs, Hunter isn’t lined up with his hand in the dirt being asked to play a 5-tech role but rather lined up as a 7-tech or wide-9 playing a slightly-different role. As Donatell mentioned, it’s a real transition to playing a standup OLB role and it’s normal.

Looks like we will need to be patient with Hunter.

5 stats to take away from Vikings 28-24 win over the Lions

After Sunday’s game, there are some interesting stats to focus on moving forward

The Minnesota Vikings beat the Detroit Lions 28-24 over the Detroit Lions in what was a true clunker game for them.

There were plenty of storylines coming out of the game, including quarterback Kirk Cousins leading a game-winning drive culminating in a comeback victory for the Vikings.

When you look at the stats for this game and the Vikings as a whole, there are some interesting stats to take away. Here are five that you need to be aware of.

Vikings defensive coordinator clears up coverage bust

Ed Donatell clarifies what went wrong on the 53-yard touchdown pass to Quez Watkins

The Minnesota Vikings didn’t have a lot go right on Monday night against the Philadelphia Eagles and a lot of that had to do with the secondary.

The Vikings had a massively blown coverage on the first play of the second quarter that resulted in a 53-yard touchdown by Eagles wide receiver Quez Watkins.

On this play, it is QQH (quarters on the nearside with cover-2 on the farside) and Dantzler is responsible for carrying Watkins deep. He doesn’t carry the receiver and it makes Bynum look bad on the broadcast when he played this correctly.

At his press conference on Thursday morning, Donatell confirmed that it was Dantzler’s fault.

Cody Alexander, who claims to have created match quarters coverage, broke down the play on his Twitter explaining why this is on Dantzler.

Later in the game, Dantzler did have another coverage bust that led to rookie fourth-round pick Akayleb Evans entering the game. Because of Evans’ performance on Monday, Donatell also hinted that he might be getting more playing time moving forward.

Outside of these two plays, Dantzler did have a good game but you can’t be making these kinds of coverage busts all season. They need to be cleaned up and quickly.

[mm-video type=playlist id=01eqbyjpbajmjvnqmj player_id=none image=https://vikingswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]

5 reasons for optimism ahead of Week 3 vs Lions

Despite the brutal loss on Monday, there is plenty of reason for optimism moving forward for the Vikings

After losing a brutal 24-7 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, there was still some good on the all-22.

The Vikings are still less than two weeks removed from a 23-7 domination of the rival Green Bay Packers, so there are still things that should give fans hope.

After the debacle on Monday night, I found five things that should give Vikings fans optimism moving forward.

The Vikings defense is starting to show tendencies

The Vikings are showing trends on defense

Through two games, the Minnesota Vikings have had their share of ups and downs, especially on defense.

Against the Green Bay Packers, the defense was dominant. They forced two turnovers along with accumulating four sacks and 18 pressures on star quarterback Aaron Rodgers. They were consistent against the pass but were a little flawed against the run.

On Monday night versus the Eagles, it was a different story. They challenged Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts to beat them with a bunch of layups and he did just that. They amassed nearly 500 yards and made it look easy.

The defense itself is starting to show some tendencies as far as how they lineup. The Vikings defense is currently second in the NFL in how much they lineup in a Nickel defense.

There are some other tendencies that are worth noting that ESPN’s Kevin Seifert included in that thread. The Vikings are

  • Lowest in the NFL in man coverage at 7.7%
  • Highest in cover-2 usage at 46.2

These shouldn’t be a big surprise as defensive coordinator Ed Donatell runs a lot of cover-2 and quarters coverage to keep things in front of them. As things progress, mixing in more man coverage will likely occur as Donatell uses more blitzes to keep things interesting.

[mm-video type=playlist id=01eqbyjpbajmjvnqmj player_id=none image=https://vikingswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]